


Decisions and Revisions

by argos



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: AU, Lots of confusion, Lots of denial, M/M, Slow Burn, So is ringo, Time Travel, Time Travel AU, i dont know where im going with this, paul is from the future, the beatles never happened
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-03-08 09:23:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 68,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argos/pseuds/argos
Summary: Paul McCartney, born 18 June, 1999, works at a failing record shop in downtown Liverpool. John Lennon, born 9 October, 1940, played in a rock band that never made it big before falling into obscurity. The two were never supposed to meet.Fortune has other plans, it seems.Tossed unceremoniously into a place so close to but so far from home, Paul struggles to find any sense of familiarity. As he tries to come to terms with whatever it is fate has thrown at him, he may find, instead, that he belongs here more than anywhere.





	1. Thou Strumpet Fortune

There was always a wave of customers to Anthony’s Records and Music at about four in the afternoon. Of course, that only meant that around ten or so people showed up in an hour, but it was more than the rest of the day ever got. As it was, at high noon, the shop was vacant. 

Of everybody but Paul, that is. 

The man in question was leaning against a record stand, reorganizing the old labels for probably the third time this week. It was the thing he’d do after taking inventory and cleaning and sorting and anything else that actually needed doing – he’d find a new way to order them. Alphabetically, by genre, by year, by popularity – hell, even by color. 

It took no stretch of the imagination to gather that he was bored. 

His constant reshuffling of the records confused the few regulars the shop ever had, but they eventually learned to take it in good humor. 

Paul McCartney worked in a rather small, out-of-the-way music shop in downtown Liverpool, not too far away from his family’s house, which made it convenient. He could pop home on his break for lunch, and would usually have done so today, had he not remembered just as he was about to leave that he’d forgotten to do the shopping. He made a note to do it after he got off work, before his father could chide him. 

Half of the shop sold instruments. Mostly guitars and basses, but a few brass and woodwinds, too, and a single drum kit. They’d had it for about a year now, and nobody was interested. He didn’t really mind; once it goes, the owner wouldn’t get another one, and Paul quite enjoyed banging out a rhythm when he was so bored that not even shuffling the records could help. 

The rest of the shop had CDs, old records, and sheet music. There was a small upright piano pushed against a wall, just in case somebody wanted to test out a book before they bought it. Hardly anyone ever did, and the few times Paul sat down to it, he noticed it to be terribly out of tune. The piano was so seldom used that it wasn’t worth the money getting a tuner in. 

Most of the records in the unsorted pile were one-hit wonders or short-lived fads of the 60s and 70s, none of the more famous bands or artists one would usually see, since those were already placed on the racks. Paul was familiar with all of the more obscure ones the shop carried, and he even liked a few, but mostly, he could see why they hardly sold. 

He grabbed the top record. The sleeve had a picture of four men – boys, really – and was titled The Best of the Silver Beatles. He couldn’t recall any of their songs without flipping the sleeve over and reading the song list. 

It had some covers of older songs and a few things he knew weren’t famous. “Please Please Me”, “Help!”, “Norwegian Wood”, and “Girl” were listed as being sung (and probably written) by a John Lennon, according to the credits, since those weren’t the familiar titles. 

Paul remembered having listened to the record before and he liked the band well enough. The drummer never seemed consistent, and some of the guitars buzzed and rang, making it obvious that the Silver Beatles didn’t make it big for a reason, but the singer had a good voice. Powerful, passionate, versatile. 

Members were John Lennon: Vocals, Rhythm Guitar; George Harrison: Guitar; Stuart Sutcliffe: Bass Guitar; Pete Best: Percussion. All no-names, long forgotten dreamers. 

It made him think for a few moments about misfortune and wasted talent. Paul really thought the band had potential, if their drummer didn’t speed up during the songs, or if one of their guitars would stop buzzing, or if the basslines weren’t so hesitant. They just needed a bit of shuffling, different members, maybe practice or refinement, and the Silver Beatles really could have been something. 

He had always been able to notice voices. If he’s heard it once, he’ll recognize it any time later, though he may not remember where it was from. He’d read before that smell was a person’s most nostalgic sense, but Paul was the exception to that rule. 

The singer’s voice had been untrained, unprofessional, and raw. Some could make it like that; they got famous with very personal, emotional music. People like Jim Morrison or Alice Cooper did it well; the voice itself was by no means ‘pretty’, but its emotive ability was endlessly captivating. Paul could list dozens who got famous trying, but those who succeeded were rarer. And this John Lennon, whoever he was, could do it. 

Paul shook the oddly melancholy thoughts from his head; it’s useless to dwell on such things so long passed. If half of these old musicians weren’t dead by Paul’s time, they had to be old as dirt. 

He finished sorting out the records quickly – this time, he ordered them by every five years, then by genre. He’d have to make new labels for the sections of the racks, but until then, if he did have any customers, they’d just have to figure it out themselves. 

By the changing tone of light coming through the windows, Paul knew that the sky was darkening. It had been overcast all day, so he was not surprised, but he had hoped the rain would wait until he’d gotten home. Now, he had to hope it let up before he had to leave. 

He hummed along to the song that softly played over the speakers from the back of the shop when the rain began to fall lightly. It provided a soothing backdrop to Paul’s sleepy day, and might have lulled him into a light sleep right there on the floor, had it not been for the chiming of the bell on the door as it swung open. 

Paul glanced up to see a familiar slight figure ducking into the shop, clad in a raincoat that near engulfed him but holding no umbrella. His hair was soaked and drops of water dripped from the tip of his nose as he shook his shaggy head. 

“Hey, Ritchie,” he greeted. “Have a nice shower?” 

Richard Starkey looked up at him as he shrugged off his raincoat, dropping it by the door, and ran a hand through his hair. His malleable face held the sad, depressed sort of expression that Paul knew was an act as he lamented, “There’s no hot water left, Paul. Why’d you use it all?” 

Ritch was one of the few frequent customers at the record shop. His visits used to be strictly of an economic nature, as he was new to this neighborhood, and the record shop (surprisingly) had a better selection than the one closer to his old place had. Now, though, since he’d bought most everything worth anything, he stopped by just to chat on occasion. He had Paul had become very good friends. 

He had a very level voice. It was the sort that was small, but that carried, and sounded quite clear; he probably couldn’t whisper if he tried. On occasion, when he’d hum the song stuck in his head, Paul noticed that his range was rather limited, but the notes he held were strong, confident. 

Paul hoisted himself up from the floor by the record racks and sat in the revolving chair behind the register as Ritch hopped up on the counter. 

“So, what’s up? Aren’t you usually at work now?” 

Ritch dug a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, plucked one out, and lit it. He offered the pack to Paul as he took his own between his teeth. Paul shook his head; he wasn’t much into smoking. 

He shrugged, “Took off. About a week ago. Supposed to go out to London with some mates, ‘cause tomorrow’s me birthday, y’know, but they all cancelled, on account of the rain an’ all.” 

“Well, actually, I didn’t know,” Paul said. “How old?” 

“Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a lady’s age?” Ritch put on a creaky falsetto, sounding more like Graham Chapman in drag than an aging woman, and batted his lashes. “I’ll be twenty-one.” 

He grinned. “Congrats, mate. You’re ancient.” 

Ritch hunched over, putting his hand on the small of his back. “It’s no fun getting’ old, truly,” he said. “Least I’ll get that seniors discount, eh?” 

Paul scoffed. “Yeah, right.” 

There was a comfortable silence, in which Paul listened to the rain as it fell against the window panes, and Ritch slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke. He leaned towards Paul for his next breath and blew the smoke out with force, aimed directly at his face. Paul pushed back against the counter and rolled away in his chair. 

“You arse, Starkey, that stuff stinks something awful.” He cleared his throat and glared playfully at his friend. 

“Still smells better than you.” 

Paul kicked him lightly in the shin just as a clap of thunder echoed from the skies above. It was the sort that rang like a sheet of metal shaking; it was thick and voluminous, much like the clouds it came from. 

“Well, I can see why they’d wanna cancel. Still, it’s a bit of a downer.” 

Ritchie huffed another breath of smoke and nodded. “It is. But, honestly, I think those lads jus’ wanted to go get pissed in some London pubs with London girls instead o’ Liverpool ones. Me birthday was just an excuse.” 

Paul glanced at his digital watch. “Well, if you feel like hanging ‘round for a few hours, you can come over to mine once I get off. Won’t have cake or anything, and you’d have to deal with Dad an’ Mike, but it’s no worse bein’ alone.” 

He could tell that Ritch was tempted but didn’t want to seem too eager, so he looked out of the window into the rain and said, “Might do, if the rain’s not letting up.” He didn’t want to admit it, but he didn’t like being left alone on his birthday. Since it was a Friday and he didn’t work Saturdays, he saw no harm in hanging around with Paul for however long they could bear each other. 

Ritchie worked at the railroad. He directed routes and made sure the rails were up to snuff; he had some amount of authority over the construction and maintenance workers, and it wasn’t necessarily a dead-end job, but it didn’t give him much intellectual or creative stimulus. For that, he turned to music. 

He wasn’t much of a singer, but he could drum a mean beat, and every chance he had to actually play with someone – not too often, mind, but occasionally – he reckoned it sounded pretty good. He’d played some with Paul before, and they worked well, but hardly had the chance to do anything. 

“Get to those drums, Ritchie, I’ve had a song stuck in my head all day.” 

Ritch hid a grin to himself, glad for a distraction and wondering what Paul would play; it could very well be on piano or guitar, and given Paul’s wide range of musical tastes, it could nearly be any song. 

Since the piano was grossly out of tune, Paul grabbed one of the old acoustic guitars off of the shelf. He liked to tune the things weekly, just in case a customer came in and wanted to try them out (they hardly ever did, but one thing that could not be said of Paul was that he did not take his job seriously). He sat down in his chair and rolled it over in front of Ritchie, who’d made himself comfortable on the stool behind the drums. 

“Just join in once you recognize it,” he told him. Ritch nodded. 

He recognized the opening two chords immediately. He grinned and joined in with a beat that fit seamlessly with the rhythm of Paul’s guitar. 

“This thing,” he sang in his best Elvis impression, “called love,” even if the song wasn’t by Elvis. “I just can’t handle it.” And, admittedly, though Paul thought he could sing reasonably well, he couldn’t sound anything quite like Elvis. 

Joining in, Ritchie put on his most obnoxiously southern American accent. The rain made an interesting contrast to their mixed-up lyrics and out-of-order verses. They both knew the song, of course; it was a classic, but messing about made it feel more carefree. It felt more improvised, more alive. 

As Ritchie rapidly hit the symbols as some sort of conclusion to their impromptu performance, another clap of thunder sounded. 

“Well,” Paul set the guitar back up on its spot on the wall, “if that wasn’t ominous.” 

Ritch shrugged as he left the drums, laying the two sticks down flat on the counter. “Even the heavens above can’t handle the power of the King and Queen.” 

They drummed and strummed out a few more bits of music before the rainfall got so loud that they could hardly hear themselves anymore. It distantly occurred to Paul that the weather wasn’t usually this malevolent, and that something like this wasn’t forecasted, but he never really concerned himself with the weather beyond its immediate impacts. 

“Looks like you’ll be here a while,” he said to Ritch as he put the guitar up. 

“Pity.” 

He hummed to himself as he settled back behind the counter. Even after playing all those songs just now, he had one of those songs stuck in his head – one from that record. He didn’t remember it well enough to recall the name or even most of the lyrics, but it was catchy, and he couldn’t rid himself of the earworm. 

As Ritchie occupied himself with some paperwork that must have been some sort of train schedule or other boring tripe that Paul couldn’t bother to be concerned with, Paul pulled out his phone and went to the internet, typing in ‘silver beetles’ to the search bar. 

The first results, once they had the courtesy to load in such bad weather, were webpages about soldier beetles and stag beetles, which Paul assumed were the actual insects, and lead him nowhere he wanted to go. Back up to the search bar, he added ‘band’ to the end of the key words, which gave him slightly better results. 

They had a Wikipedia article, of course. Paul figured that nobody cared enough about the esoteric group that nobody would bother putting false information up about them, so it was his best bet for clear information. 

As it turned out, they were the Silver Beatles, no Beetles. Though he couldn’t erase the image of literal insects playing old music from his mind, he had to admit that the pun on ‘beat’ was slightly clever. 

The page was concise, much like the band’s lifetime: formed in 1960 and disbanded by 1963, they released three haphazard, messy records that failed to make any impact in ratings or bring in royalties. They became quite popular here in Liverpool, but fell apart when they never gained traction in other cities. They went through two other drummers besides Best, neither of which worked out, and Stuart Sutcliffe quit when he realized that his passion was not in the performing arts. 

George Harrison slipped into a quiet obscure life and passed away some ten years ago from cancer, while John Lennon moved to America after the band’s failure and fell into the rampant counterculture drugs and promiscuity that characterized the following two decades. Apparently, he died before he was forty years old. 

The same part of his mind that entertained theories of faked moon landings and Adolf Hitler’s secret bunker in Antarctica wondered if his death was something common, like an illness or cancer, an overdose or suicide, or if he’d been murdered. The article didn’t say, but it did hint at involvement in a few anti-war demonstrations which, Paul discovered once he pressed the blue link, often turned ironically violent. 

There were only a few pictures of the actual band on Google Images, all of which were slightly out of focus, and mostly of their album covers. Their hair was done up in some sort of Elvis-like style, and Paul reckoned that they could have made relatively good impersonators, if they weren’t so thin and angular. The two who were the clearest in the photographs, the two in the middle, each had sharp jawlines, and one had quite a striking nose. They may have been handsome, but it was only a photograph. 

“Whatcha up to, Paulie?” 

He grimaced at the nickname; it was what his mother used to call him, and only her. Ritchie wasn’t to know that, though, so he did his best to push the feeling of emergent pain aside. “Just lookin’ up some stuff ‘bout an old record. Nothing good, though. Didn’t seem to age well.” 

Ritch neatened his stack of papers and slid them back into the pocket of his oversized coat on the floor as he nodded. “I’ve no bloody idea how this place is in business, Paul. You’ve got so much shit no-one buys.” 

“Well, we’re still here.” Paul had wondered the same thing quite often, though. This was just a little shop; the owner certainly wasn’t making any profit, and Paul certainly couldn’t live off of what little he, as just an employee, made. 

He was only nineteen, after all. He finished school with good marks – excellent marks, really – and he could have gotten into a good school, but there was the problem of money. Only that he didn’t have any, that is, so he couldn’t pay for anything worth his time. Another issue was that he had no idea what he wanted to study. 

Well, he knew what he wanted to study, which was music, but he didn’t know what he could study that his father would approve of. Legally, he didn’t need his father’s permission for something like this, but he did love his dad, and he was essentially bumming in his house for the entire year until he can make up his mind of what worthwhile degree he wanted to pursue, so he felt a certain obligation. Sometimes he envied Ritchie, who was a couple years his senior, and who had known what he was going to do with his life (whether he was satisfied or not) since he was sixteen and first got his job at the rails. 

“What should I do, Ritchie?” he asked, not entirely meaning to. Not aloud, at least. 

“Wha’?” 

He shook his head. “No, never mind. I was jus’ thinking.” 

“Dangerous pastime, that.” 

“Yeah.” They were quiet for a moment longer, until Paul decided that he may as well get whatever advice out of Ritch that he could. “I meant, when I go to school, what should I study?” 

“I dunno. What d’you wanna study?” 

He shrugged. “Some kind of arts, probably. Music and such. But that won’t give me anythin’ I’d need to earn a living, according to me da’.” 

“If you’re just gonna listen to your da’, then do whatever he wants you to do. Be a lawyer or a doctor or a bloody chartered accountant or whatever. If you won’t do what you want to anyway, then it don’t really matter, right?” 

Paul heard a bit of snideness in his tone, and that made him shrink back in his chair a bit. He was aware of how he must come across; he sounded like he was simply complaining but wouldn’t do anything about it, so he just let the subject drop with a “Yeah, I guess.” 

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, sensing Paul’s resignation. “I’d be no help to you, really, ‘cause I jus’ found a thing that worked well enough and stuck with it. Guess I was lucky; never had to actually decide what to do.” 

“How d’you mean?” 

“I mean, when I turned sixteen and me family decided they needed me working, the only place that’d hire me was the rails. I never had to choose what to do or where to go like you do.” 

Paul looked at his feet contemplatively. “And I need to choose right the first time,” he said. “I’ve got enough money to go to school for a while, but not enough to switch halfway through when I decide I hate what I’m doing.” 

“I s’pose it’s a risk everybody takes.” 

And he did understand his father’s perspective. Pragmatically, if he were to spend so much money learning something, it should be something that would pay him back in the end. His father was well-intentioned and the rational part of Paul’s brain told him to trust the advice of someone far older than himself. But was pragmatism really so valuable, if it came at the risk of Paul’s lifetime happiness? He would be miserable behind a desk, doing arithmetic or envelope pushing all day. He wasn’t argumentative enough to be lawyer, to begin with – and his perpetually pacific expression didn’t make him scary enough to compensate for it. If he could live through so much schooling, he could go into medical. He fondly remembered his mother’s nursing and midwife career, and how happy it made her to help people, but he also recalled how depressed she would be when she came home if the baby or the mother didn’t make it that day, or if she went into work and found that one of her elderly patients’ beds was now occupied by someone else. 

And he remembered seeing his mother herself grow weak and pale, looking much older than she should have, when he was only fourteen, old enough to remember in vivid detail but too young to cope. And if he were a doctor, he could hardly imagine having the skill to diagnose such an illness, but not quite – so tantalizingly close, but not quite – the power to treat it. He could not be a doctor. 

Paul spent quite a while watching Ritchie turn the ring on his index finger out of boredom. That was the first thing he’d noticed about the man; he always had multiple rings on each hand. None of them seemed particularly valuable, but they must have had some sentimental value to him, because they rarely varied. 

~ 

After a while, the rain stopped falling with such intensity. There was still a light drizzle, and since it was summer, the sun wasn’t setting quite yet, but Paul decided that five thirty was close enough to the closing time of six to head home. With his luck, if he waited any longer, the rain would come back with a vengeance. 

“Let’s head out now,” he announced to his friend, tearing him from his reverie. “I doubt the weather’ll get any better.” 

As Ritch gathered his raincoat from the floor, Paul grabbed his jacket. It hadn’t been raining when he left for work this morning, and the weather hadn’t warned him of such a downpour, so he was woefully unprepared for it. 

They left the shop and adopted a brisk pace pack to Paul’s house. “The weather on me phone said it’d be dry today,” Ritch began. “I think it must’ve just been the storm slowin’ down the service, stopping the updated weather from loadin’.” 

“But it showed up on mine different from yesterday’s,” Paul said, “and it said it wouldn’t rain.” 

“I wouldn’t have expected it to be quite so wrong. Meteorology’s gone to the dumps these days.” 

Paul scoffed. “I really doubt was any better fifty years ago.” 

Ritchie shrugged. 

As they walked, the rain regained some of its weight, and it started to soak right trough Paul’s jacket. He glanced at his friend, who was mostly dry underneath his raincoat, with the hood protecting his hair. Paul didn’t even have a hood on his jacket; he made a mental note to keep an umbrella at the shop from now on. 

Cars raced down the street beside them. People always drove more recklessly in the rain, and the slick streets didn’t make it any safer. Paul could drive, himself, but he never really needed too; everything was either a walk, bus, or train ride away, and paying for the transit system was less expensive than paying for gas and insurance. On top of that, with the type of job he had and the hours he worked, he hardly had time to get in any exercise, so his walks to and from work and the shops were his only chance. 

“What’ll we do once we get to your place?” Ritchie asked. 

Paul hummed, thinking. “Mike’s staying over tonight with some friends, I think. I’d forgotten ‘til now. And Da’s been working late for a while, so maybe we’ll have the place to ourselves for a bit. Why, what’d you want to do?” 

He laughed lightly, “I was mostly concerned with what we’d have for dinner.” 

Shrugging, Paul answered, “I dunno, I think we have some Ramen in the cabinet somewhere,” winking at his friend to let him know that they wouldn’t be eating Ramen for dinner. His father would never allow such an insubstantial dinner; Paul had learned too cook after his mother’s death, and Jim McCartney expected him to do it. “Nah, I’ll make something. Not sure what we have, though, since I haven’t gone to the shops yet this week.” 

“How domestic,” Ritchie quipped, and Paul sent him a look that said, Do you want to eat my food or not? 

The following events have left Paul’s mind in a deep sort of existential regret, the sort that makes you rethink each of your habits and actions, but the sort that has such little impact on true events that you lose your resolutions as quickly as you make them. 

Thinking back on it, he remembers the doppler effect that the car engines have when they race by him. He heard the noise grow steadily louder and higher as they neared him, then heard it recede as the car disappeared off into the distance, so often that he hardly noticed it anymore. That’s where he went wrong. Not noticing. 

Nothing registered in his mind as being out of the usual when he heard a car horn blare from behind him; people in Liverpool were quite trigger-happy when it came to horns, so it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. He’d become numb to what was supposed to be an alarm, and he always thought bitterly in retrospect of how ineffective people’s use of the car horn has made it. 

Since he did not notice car engines or car horns anymore, it was no surprise that he did not notice when both of those sounds grew louder and closer than they normally would. 

What he did notice, however, was Ritchie’s frightened cry of, “Paul! Move!” 

He felt a sharp tug on his arm, pulling him towards the rows of buildings and away from the edge of the sidewalk. Just then, Paul twisted around to see what exactly was causing the alarm in Ritch’s voice, and in doing so, resisted his attempt to get Paul to safety. It was no conscious decision on Paul’s part to wrench his arm out of his friend’s grasp; instinct told him to look at the danger and flee, instead of jumping blindly. 

Instinct was, quite contrarily, the greatest threat to his wellbeing. His inaction the moment Ritchie tried to pull him to safety left him in the direct path of the black van barreling towards him, skidding diagonally along the wet road. 

“PAUL!” 

He felt only two things, then. The first, a great splash of cold water against his legs as he stumbled away from the car, only just overcoming his deer-in-the-headlights shock. The second, a flat sort of impact that seemed to hit every part of his front at once and blanketed his vision in darkness. 

~ 

Paul hadn’t made the smartest move, turning to see what was coming at them instead of following Ritchie’s plea. But, then again, Ritchie hadn’t made the best decision, either, as he rushed after his friend on impulse, right into the vehicle’s path.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, how was it? I've only got another chapter or so written, so I still don't have that concrete a plan moving forward , but I hope you like where I'm going, and I definitely would like to hear what you think!


	2. An Overwhelming Question

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Paul is more than a bit confused.

The first thing Paul felt was the throbbing in his head. It seemed to come from right behind his eyes and spread from there in every direction, pulsing out with each heartbeat. He squinted to rid himself of the pain, but that only intensified the sharp stabbing sensation. 

Being sure to keep his eyebrows raised and the muscles around his eyes relaxed, Paul rubbed his temples lightly. That almost helped. 

“You alright, mate?” His voice sounded full, like it came from a thick neck and soft cheeks. Probably a short, portly sort of fellow and probably innocuous. 

Paul tried to open his eyes to match the voice to a face, but he found that he couldn’t, not yet. His entire face felt sore, and it made him dizzy to nod in agreement, but it made the man sigh with a resigned, “Take care, then.”

His footsteps faded as he went on his way, and Paul considered the situation he was in. 

Even without the aid of his eyes, Paul could tell that he reclined against a cool, rough surface. The side of a building, most likely. And, judging by both the temperature and the lack of light shining through his eyelids, he figured the sun had set some indeterminate time ago. He couldn’t quite remember how he got to be in this situation. 

After a while, he stopped  literally  hearing the blood as it rushed through his veins, and though the headache persisted, he could blink his eyes open slowly. 

It was dark, as he had assumed. The summer air had the heavy feeling of being recently cool, but not quite so heavy as it should have; wasn’t it raining? That was one thing Paul was sure he remembered – heavy rain. The air was dry, and the stars above shined down on him. Where were the clouds?

He decided that the passing of the weather was a peripheral issue. 

Pushing himself up from the ground, Paul groaned. His entire body felt like he’d fallen flat into calm waters from a great height. It was hard not to knit his eyebrows together in confusion, but the effort to keep his muscles relaxed contributed almost as much to his headache. 

He looked around and saw that he was relatively close to the music shop. Had he been coming from work, then? It was odd, this late at night. Waking up against a wall and facing the street hadn’t told him where he’d been going, and nothing about his situation told him why he was there. 

He decided, on a whim, to retrace his rout back to the shop. On top of not raining, Paul noticed, the ground showed no signs of ever being wet in the recent past. Just as he was trying to figure out why he thought it  _ should  _ have been raining in the first place, Paul stopped in his tracks. 

Had he been drugged and robbed? He’d heard cautionary tales of men who’d bump into you, seemingly on accident, while surreptitiously taking the opportunity to shoot you with some drug that left you dead to the world while they took your ID, license, card, everything. 

He patted the pockets of his jeans – that’s why he thought it should be raining, he decided, because they were soaking wet – and felt that his phone and wallet were still there. That was a relief. He pulled out his wallet, just to check that it still had everything (which it did, most fortunately), then grabbed his phone to check the time. 

When he pressed the home button, the screen lit up, but the light was shining through a spider’s web of cracks that spread from one corner of the phone to the other. Alarmed, Paul used the thumbprint function to unlock his phone, then swiped from side to side to make sure that the touchscreen still worked. It did, though probably shouldn’t have, with such intense damage – he felt fragments of glass stick to his thumb as he touched the screen. Just like everything else, Paul wondered how his phone came to be in such a state. 

He noted that the time was five fifty, and that the date was 7 July. It all seemed familiar, and Paul was about to just accept the time and date as fact, before it occurred to him that it shouldn’t be this dark at only six o’clock in the afternoon. It was high summer, after all. What was going on?

Maybe his phone really was broken. 

Paul slipped it back into his pocket and trudged slowly along the sidewalk, feeling with each step the growing discomfort of his sore limbs, compounded with the damp denim of his jeans rubbing against his thighs. 

As he walked, Paul noticed a few other passers-by glancing sideways at him. He probably looked in a right state, he rationalized, so it was no wonder he was getting these stares; if he looked even half as bad as he felt, he didn’t want to encounter a mirror anytime soon. 

Approaching the part of town where the music shop  _ should  _ be, music reached his ears, growing steadily louder. It was old rock ‘n roll, he found, and wondered why someone was at the music shop at this time of night – he  _ had  _ closed shop, hadn’t he? Paul couldn’t remember. 

If he hadn’t, then, it seemed that someone had broken in, torn everything down but the very bricks it was built with, and converted it into a pub.  _ What? _

Paul was sure this was the right place. It was right next to the crosswalk he passed every day, just as it always was, and it was across from an old bank teller. But . . . it wasn’t. The music shop simply  _ was not _ . 

In its place sat a pub, the door brightly illuminated by a neon sign proclaiming it to be “The Cavern”. The sounds of music were louder now, and it certainly sounded like a live band, if the pauses were any indication – he couldn’t tell much more about it than the quick pace and presence of loud drums, since it was muffled by the door. 

Shaking his head in a vain attempt at clearing his mind, Paul pushed the door open and stepped inside. 

If there was a bell on the door, it was drowned out by the cacophony of people milling about, gathered in large groups around too small tables, or huddled in front of the stage they blocked. He could tell that there was a  band up there, and they were playing familiar songs, but he couldn’t see them above the sea of intoxicated patrons. 

Looking around, Paul registered an odd feeling of being out of place before he could tell the reason why. He looked at the people swarming around him; there were men in old jumpers, button-downs, and jackets; women in blouses, long skirts. Then it hit him – this wasn’t a modern style of dress. The old music, the old clothes – he felt as though he had, by stepping through the door, also stepped through several decades. 

He shook his head again. 

“ What’ya  doin’ ‘ere, son?”

Paul looked to his left on a whim, because those words spoken were the only ones he could actually discern through the chaos. He wasn’t sure they were directed at him until his eyes landed on the old barkeep standing behind the counter, looking his way with scrutiny. 

Approaching the bar, he said, “Pardon?”

The barkeep didn’t seem to like the way Paul rested his elbows against the grimy counter like he did it almost every weekend. He was used to being familiar in bars (he didn’t go to his local watering hole  _ too  _ often, but enough to be somewhat known). This man didn’t recognize him, and he was suspicious, obviously, making Paul uncharacteristically uncomfortable. He awkwardly retracted his elbows and tucked them into his sides. 

“I know me sign’s out o’ date, lad, but that don’ mean that jus’ anybody can come for a drink,” he said, looking down at Paul through thick spectacles. He nodded his head to the right, and Paul’s eyes followed his direction. 

Hanging on the front of a liquor cabinet was an old sign, its edges frayed, colors slightly faded. It read, 

_ To purchase alcohol, a person must be 18 years of age, born on or before today’s date in 1940.  _

Maybe the sign was a bit old, but there was no way that it could have been  _ that  _ old. “But it’s not – it’s not 1958,” he said, perplexed. 

“You deaf or  sommat ?” the barkeep didn’t appreciate what he thought was cheek. “I jus’ said it was old. But that don’t mean some kid like you can come in ‘ere for some beer. I don’ sell ta minors.” 

Paul ran a hand through his still-damp hair, making the barkeep notice the state of his clothing. He was probably about to ask about how he got to be soaking wet when it was dry all day, when Paul fished his wallet out of his pocket. “Look, mate,” he began, pulling out his ID. “I really wasn’t gonna drink anything. Tight budget an’ all that. But, anyway, I’m nineteen, see?” He handed the man his card just to prove his point.

Squinting at his card, then at Paul, then back at his card, the barkeep laughed. “God, you’re jus’  havin ’ a laugh at me expense, yeah? Even kids know that a fake card’s gotta have a real date on it.” He tossed his card back to him. “Next time, do us a favor, yeah? Have ‘em put you born sixty years  _ ago _ , not sixty years  _ ‘til _ .” He looked away from Paul, shaking his head, wiping clean a mug with the cloth tied to his belt, muttering something inaudible. 

Paul was frozen for a moment, mulling over the unintelligible conversation that just took place before stuffing his wallet back in his pocket and turning around. 

He found a quiet table in a less congregated area of the bar, lonely in a dark, secluded corner, just perfect for brooding to himself and questioning his existence. 

From here, he could see the band, but he chose not to look at them. He stared into the wooden grains of the table, following the curves with his thumb, idly listening to the music. Now playing was “Come Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings, not quite in the  usual do o -wop  style, but familiar, nonetheless. He couldn’t place where he might have heard the style of singing before – it sounded like some band he knew, definitely – and he didn’t try to. He had bigger priorities than some stupid song. 

First and foremost: why exactly was there a bar in the place of the music shop? It wasn’t just the music shop it seemed to have replaced, either; what was once the bakery next door was just the other side of the room, no wall dividing the two anymore. There were pillars, since it was a load-bearing part for the ceiling, but real division. This wasn’t the sort of change that could happen overnight. 

Just what had happened to him?

His head still ached, but it began to fade as he let his thumbnail follow the grains of wood. It was a mechanical motion to distract his limbs from the odd feeling of both disuse and overuse at the same time. The music around him could distract his mind at least enough to block all the questions that circled in his primordial soup of comprehension. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get any thinking done.

The band was still playing the same song, he noticed, and began to mouth the words.  _ Well, love, love me darlin' _ _ ; _ _ come and go with me. Please don't send me way beyond the sea  _ – 

But the  words he remembered weren’t the ones he heard; after the first line or so of each verse, he realized, the singer was not only mixing up the lyrics, but he was improvising with phrases quite ill-fitting to the mood of the song. Paul was sure he heard something about ‘to the penitentiary’ –  and if that wasn’t completely made up, then something really was screwing with his head. 

So, there he sat for what felt like hours, listening to that fool making up lyrics off the top of his head, and almost having a good time of it, too. It wasn’t so immersive that he noticed when the music stopped, though; he had it playing well enough in his head now that he hardly heard anything else around him. Sometimes it was better that way, not hearing things. Not noticing things. (The thought struck him as sort of déjà vu, but predictably, he couldn’t remember why.)

A shadow descended upon him. Not the metaphorical sort that came about from such tumultuous internal conflict, mind, as would understandably befall Paul; it was a literal shadow. Someone had come up to him. 

The slightly nasal voice of who Paul guessed was a young man spoke to him. “And what’s up with you, mate? Why’re you here  _ all by your lonesome? _ ” The man to whom the voice belonged slowed down as he spoke those last words with a dramatic inflection. He set his hands on the table, and the pale skin was the only part of him that Paul could see. “Your girl leave you or  somethin ’?”

Paul didn’t look up. “ Somethin ’ like that,” he said mildly, not exactly in the mood to talk. 

“Well,  drownin ’ your sorrows in a drink won’t do you any good if you haven’t got a drink to drown in.”

Shrugging, he replied, “Barkeep thinks I’m too young.”

“And are ye?”

Paul just shook his head, resting his forehead against the palm of his hand. Can’t this guy take a hint? He wasn’t in the mood for conversation. 

“You need a  fuckin ’ drink, mate. I’ll be back.”

And the shadow disappeared. It was a strange encounter, and would have left Paul reeling, if he weren’t purposely trying  _ not  _ to think about it. He hoped the guy wasn’t serious, or if he was, that he forgot about his half-hearted promise to get him a drink. Not that  Paul wouldn’t  _ gladly _  take it  . . .

The man was gone for quite a while, and Paul began to expect that he would not return. He almost hoped that he wouldn’t; one less person to talk to was one less thing to worry about. But luck was never on Paul’s side, it seemed, as the shadow reappeared, and the same pale hand slid a dripping mug of beer right under his nose. 

Paul only looked at the mug for a fraction of a second before taking it in hand and bringing it to his lips. “Cheers,” he said, looking up. 

He almost spits it right back out. 

It’s not because this  was  the single most striking man he’s ever seen. No, that wouldn’t give Paul such a strong reaction, even though it was true. He had a pointed, aquiline nose and sharp eyes that seemed to cut right through into his own, and his hair was styled almost perfectly in a way that Paul had only ever seen done in old movies or photographs, and his jawline was defined and strong (almost intimidating), and his lips were thin, but no, that’s not why Paul almost spit out his drink. 

He knew this man. Somewhere before, he’d seen his face – he'd crossed him on the street and made that awkward sort of eye contact you have with strangers, perhaps, or he was a lad who used to go to school with him and whom he’s since forgotten, or he was a cashier at the shops, or he was any number of random people Paul had encountered before. 

But the fact was, Paul had  _ seen him before _ . Ever since he opened his eyes and found himself leaning against some building up the road, he’d not  seen a familiar face, a familiar shop, a familiar  _ anything _ .  This man was a sight for very sore eyes.

However, the fact that he couldn’t remember  _ why  _ the man was familiar was still a minor problem.

“Er,” he said dumbly, swallowing the mouthful of beer he’d taken, just in case he was compelled to expel it again. “Do I know you?”

The man grinned at him, and his lips grew even thinner, if that was even possible, and it twisted his face into something almost like a sneer, but not quite; Paul couldn’t tell if it was charming or off-putting. He pulled a chair from somewhere behind him and swung it around before taking a seat directly across from Paul. He rested his elbows against the tabletop, so close to Paul’s own that he could feel the heat radiating from him. 

“I think you’d be the  b est  authority on that, wouldn’t ye, mate?”

Paul narrowed his eyes and continued to study the man’s face. He could almost place it. Almost. “I’ve seen ye before, I know it. Jus’ can’t recall from where.”

“Well, I don’t know you. I’d remember a face like yours.”

Not knowing whether that was a compliment or a jibe, Paul looked down at his drink. 

“You  prob’ly  just saw me up there,” the man explains, nodding his head towards the front of the pub, where the stage was now empty. “I play here some nights with me band.”

Paul knew he hadn’t looked up at the people onstage, so that wasn’t where he knew him from, but he didn’t want to waste energy trying to figure it out just yet; he was too grateful to have something (beer) to relax him. “Oh.”

“D’you like that stuff we were playin’?”

Paul looked at the man, who had a mildly hopeful expression. He was obviously fishing for compliments, and Paul chose to indulge him. “Oh, yeah. Del-Vikings, Buddy Holly. Love that old stuff.”

Across from him, the man’s head turned almost imperceptibly to the side, as though he was either confused, affronted, or both, but trying to hide it. “I know it didn’t come out  _ yesterday _ , but it’s not  _ that  _ old.” He sounded defensive. 

Paul shrugged. “Depends.” And really, it did. If you just listened to pop from the nineties onward, then, yeah, it was old, but if you studied the  Hurrian  Hymn, then it was brand new. To placate his companion, he said, “I liked it, though.”

The man nodded, reaching forward abruptly to grab the pint of beer out of Paul’s grasp. He took a deep sip before setting it back down in the middle of the table. Instinctively, Paul wanted to protest, but he remembered that he hadn’t even bought it himself. Maybe it wasn’t quite his right to be protective. 

The silence between them wasn’t awkward, but Paul feared it may grow to be, and he didn’t want the man walking away with the drink, so he said, “That, with Chantilly Lace and La  Bamba , it’s just like the  Day  the  M usic  D ied.”

Now, the man tilted his head purposefully, to show without words that he was outright confused. 

“Oh, come on. Y’know, that plane crash that killed ‘em all?” To anybody else, it may have sounded a bit insane to throw that into a conversation so casually, but this man must’ve known how the artists whose songs he was singing died, right? 

The man crossed his arms but still leaned forward, intrigued. “Mate, nobody calls it the ‘day the  fuckin ’ music died’. It was a big story in the papers, yeah, but it’s not got a  _ name.  _ Where’d ye get that from?”

“That’s what  _ everybody _  calls it,” Paul tried to explain. “Don McClean?”

“Nah , not me.  John Lennon.”

Paul stared for a moment, pathetically lost, until he realized that the man was trying to be funny. He was saying that  _ his  _ name was John Lennon. 

John Lennon? Didn’t that sound familiar?

John Lennon. John Lennon. John - 

No. 

Not the singer from the Silver Beatles, surely. 

John was a fairly common name. He'd never met a Lennon before, but they couldn’t exactly be  _ one of a kind,  _ could they?

Paul looked into his eyes again, and suddenly, the realization struck him. He remembered now why the man was familiar. He looked exactly like one of them on the cover of the album! And it couldn’t be a coincidence that he had the same name, could it?

His mind was still reeling as he heard himself say absently, “Stop  shittin ’ me.” 

The album. Sorting the records in the shop. Ritchie – playing that Queen song with him on the drums. Rain. Leaving. Walking down the sidewalk, Ritchie’s panicked shout of his name, and then - 

Hell, no. He hadn’t been hit by a fucking car. That had  _ not  _ happened. It couldn’t have. 

“What’s your problem wi’ me name, then?” John –  _ John! –  _ demanded. 

Paul stood so quickly that he knocked his chair over. “No,” he said, as some excuse for an answer, even if he knew it made no sense in the context of the question. 

“Hey, mate – hey!”

But Paul was already backing away, eyes wide as a doe’s, as he searched frantically for, and then raced towards, the exit. 

~

He was stumbling and out of breath when he stopped. He’d gone back to where he began, that spot in front of a nondescript shop, its building familiar but sign foreign, and clutched the stitch in his side. The pounding in his head was renewed. 

He wasn’t sure what he expected to find as he looked around. He didn’t expect Ritchie, and he didn’t expect to see the car that had (most definitely not) hit him, but he looked for them anyway. Logically, he knew they’d have been there when he woke up, if they were there at all, but he needed something to look for, something to hope for. He needed direction. 

A few nighttime walkers shot him wary glances, probably suspecting him of public drunkenness. He tried to compose himself before they decided to call the police on him – he had consumed alcohol, after all, and maybe it  _ would  _ show in his behavior, but quite frankly, his actions were less a result of mild intoxication as they were of severe discombobulation. 

He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath in through his nose, holding it, then releasing it through his mouth. He did this for a few moments until his pulse slowed. He hoped he could think coherently again. 

An idea struck him. 

Pulling out his phone, he unlocked it quickly, ignoring the  minuscule  splinters of glass that snagged on the pad of his thumb. He went to his contacts and found Ritchie’s number, selecting it, then holding the phone to his ear. 

It didn’t even ring. The only thing he heard was the infuriating female voice answering him robotically.  _ Welcome to  _ - 

“Fucking useless,” he swore, holding his phone so tightly in his hand that he may have felt the entire screen shift , the fragments of glass  sliding against each other like  tectonic  plates . He pocketed the thing before he could do irreparable damage. 

He didn’t notice the odd looks he got when he handled the cell phone. If he had, he would be even more suspicious. 

Paul ran his hands through his drying hair as he took to pacing a hole right through the concrete sidewalk.  His mind went everywhere at once but nowhere all the same; he didn’t know where to go, what to do, who to look for – but he knew he couldn’t go back to that bar. 

He already had that damn song stuck in his head.  _ Well, love, love me darlin’; come and go with me _ _  – _

He growled in frustration. The memory of that song – of JOHN LENNON singing that song – prevented any rational thought from taking root and granting him reason. 

Sparing one last glance at street behind him, Paul set his course for home, hoping that, at least, would be how he left it. 

~

It wasn’t. 

The house  at  Forthlin  Road looked  the same, being one portion of a brick building that had stood forever and would stand forevermore. There was  not much yard to speak of, so the little grass there was seemed unchanging.  He saw the same red step and overhang, the same windows, the same doorknob. Though nothing at all stood out as  _ wrong,  _ Paul eyed his porch with suspicion. 

It didn’t seem  _ right _ , ironically, for his house to look so normal. Of course, it would not make sense if it were completely changed – if it suddenly became an empty lot, or a fortune teller’s shop, or something else outlandish – but at least it would be consistent. 

He needed only to enter to realize that he jumped to conclusions too soon. 

The house was dark when he stepped inside, so the first thing that struck him was the smell. It didn’t smell like home as he knew it. There was something there that was hard to place. It was like when he saw someone in an unexpected place, like his doctor at a grocery store, or an old school teacher at the public offices: he didn’t recognize it immediately. It was on the top of his mind, though, so close. 

It struck him that the smell was smoke. It smelled like someone was smoking a cigarette. 

“Dad?” he called tentatively. 

He got no response. Blindly, he ran a hand along the papered wall, feeling for the switch. He found it in the usual spot, but when the lazy yellow light flooded the parlor, it was anything but usual. 

The furniture wasn’t right. The upholstery on the sofa was a faded green instead of its typical beige, and because of this, it took him a moment to realize that the sofa wasn’t even the same shape. The same went with the two adjacent chairs, the coffee table in the middle, and the rug on which it was all placed. 

The wallpaper, too, was different. It looked old. It was hideous. 

Grimacing, Paul tried to find  _ something  _ that was the same as when he left home this morning. 

He could not find it in the kitchen counters, just barely seen through the doorway; he could not find it in the light fixture above, dusty and dim; he could not find it in the carpet underneath his feet; he could not find it in the bookcase that held, instead of CDs and DVDs, larger, flat things that must have been records. 

He did find it, however, in the pictures above the mantle. 

Creeping closer, as though he were a trespasser in somebody else’s home, Paul squinted at the old photographs. They used to be in color, but now, they were monochromatic and blurry. The figures wore dated clothing and unfashionable hairstyles, but they were the same figures Paul had known forever. 

His dad and little brother, Michael, were in the one at the end. Mike was holding a football, and Dad was grinning at him. Paul remembered that he’d been the one to take the picture. The one next to it was his mother – even with shorter hair, in which he could no longer see the vibrant red, she was beautiful. 

It brought him some comfort. 

“Paul?”

Spinning around, he saw Jim McCartney, clad in striped pajamas and shuffling into the room from the hall on well-worn slippers. His hair was in disarray, as though he’d been in bed. 

Paul breathed out, “Dad,” and stumbled over to his father as though he hadn’t seen him in years. He knew his dad wasn’t one for embraces, but if he were, he’d have trouble breathing on account of Paul’s hug. 

Jim squinted his bleary eyes at him, wondering just why the sight of him made him so relieved. “Son, it’s late,” he began tentatively, not sure he really wanted to know the answer to his next question. “Where’ve you been?”

Paul bowed his head and chuckled to himself. “It’s kind of crazy,” he said by means of introduction. “I was just leaving the shop this afternoon – normal time, see – with Ritchie.”

Jim tilted his head to the side. “Who’s this Ritchie?”

“Maybe I never talked about him before. He’s a regular at the shop. Good mate.  Anyroad , it’s ‘is birthday tomorrow, but his mates ditched ‘ im , so I invited ‘ im  over for supper.”

His father crossed his arms over his chest, not really in sternness but in perplexity, and waited for him to go on. 

“And while we were  walkin ’ back – Da', you won’t believe this, but while we walked back, I think I just about got run over.”

That made him start. “What d’you mean, son?”

“Well, I would have, I mean, if Ritchie hadn’t pulled me out o’ the way. The car came right at us. I must’ve hit the concrete or  somethin ’, ‘cause I was out of it for hours.”

It felt good to tell somebody about it. Paul didn’t think he’d blacked out from hitting the ground, granted, but it was a slightly less worrisome scenario than actually getting hit by a car (which he was fairly confident was the reality of it), so he tweaked the story slightly. He also didn’t elaborate on what exactly he did when he woke, because that was a series of events he couldn’t even begin to organize in his mind, let alone voice aloud. 

Jim walked closer to his son, placing a cool hand on his forehead. “You’re a bloody Inferno, boy,” he swore. “Get ye to bed, now, and sleep. I don’ know what you were out there doin’, or with who, but we’ll talk about it once that fever’s gone.”

Paul didn’t feel feverish. He put a hand to his own face and felt the skin – maybe he was warm, yeah, or maybe he was just worked up, running high. That was probably it. Either way, he couldn’t say no to a good night’s sleep.

“Right,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “I guess we’ll sort it out in the mornin’.”

“Night,” his father said curtly before turning to go back to bed.  “I do wish you wouldn’t go out so late at night anymore,” he said softly, but still audibly. “You know how it worries your mother.”

Once he was alone, Paul looked longingly at the picture of his mother for several moments before trudging up the stairs into his room, shrugging off his jacket, shoes, and trousers, and climbing into the sheets that smelled, just like the rest of the house, a little too much like smoke and too little like detergent. 

~

“Paul, lad,”  his father’s voice gently shook him from his dreams. 

As his mind processed the fact that it was no longer resting, it occurred to him that he had dreamt of John Lennon.  It was a vague recollection, more of a notion that it had happened than a real memory, almost the same way he’d wake up with a song stuck in his head without having heard it in a long time, if at all. But he knew that he had dreamt of John Lennon. 

Paul squinted through half-asleep, blurry eyes at his father, who stood a few feet away, arms crossed complacently across his chest. “Er,” he said thickly,  reaching up to rub his eyes, “mornin’.”

“How are you, son? Your head a’ right?”

“Er, yeah. Just a bit – a bit tired, is all.” And that was true – he really did feel fine, now. His limbs didn’t ache, his eyes weren’t screaming at him to keep them shut – he just felt as if he hadn’t slept any more than an hour or so. 

“You’re friend’s downstairs,”  he said. “I  didn’t know if you’d been up yet.”

So Ritchie was here, Paul thought. That would be quite welcome – he needed to sort out what exactly happened to him last night, to know where he went before Paul regained consciousness. “Can you have ‘ im  wait a moment?” He sat up slowly. “I need to wake up a bit more.” 

“Hurry up, son. I’d not like that lad to eat all our food before  noon.”

He left Paul to gather himself. He was usually a morning person, ri sing  at dawn or earlier and quite ready for the day, but on this particular morning,  he found finding the resolve to swing his legs out from underneath the blanket very difficult. 

Looking around the room to let his eyes adjust, Paul noticed his clothes discarded in a pile on the floor; he was only wearing boxers and a plain grey t-shirt. The pile was still noticeably damp – he wondered exactly how late he’d been out, but couldn’t recall checking the time – and right next to his nightstand.  Well, right next to where his nightstand  _ should  _ be.

It was a different sort of wood, he noticed, and on top, he didn’t see his charging cable or  laptop , as he should have. There was still an alarm clock, but granted, it was not the digital sort he used; it was the old- fashioned, silver kind with a real clock face and  two small bells on top. It read  half ten. 

The rest of the room was similar to the nightstand, in regard to being quite unlike his own. His bookcase held different books, his wardrobe was too short, and the desk was near the window, instead of standing against the wall across from the door. Lying on it was a crumpled newspaper.

Paul slowly sat up, trying to ignore the vertigo that swarmed around his head , before shuffling across the carpeted floor to grab the newspaper. 

_ Liverpool Daily Post _ , it read. He hadn’t thought that paper was still in circulation (but then, he didn’t often read the paper  anyway).  The bold headline declared, “ FLIGHT FROM  RED EAST: MASS MOVEMENT TO WEST BERLIN ”. Paul tilted his head, wondering if he was recalling his history lectures right. West Berlin wasn’t exactly its own separate entity anymore, right?

He dropped the paper when he saw the date.  5  July – that seemed right,  at least, but it was the only thing  that did , because the year was  1961.

_ Oh, God, _  he thought. 


	3. Stranger in a Strange Land

Paul had never needed to  _ sit down  _ to receive news before. Nothing had ever hit him with such staggering surprise and fervor as to render him unable to stand. Even when he received the news that his mum had died,  which was undoubtedly the most upsetting he had ever gotten,  when he was only fourteen, he’d seen her weaken slowly before his eyes for months,  growing paler by the day. T he news was disheartening but no surprise. He’d come to terms, to an extent, with her passing  before the day even came . 

But seeing this date printed on paper t hat couldn’t have been more than a week old  sent an alien sensation down his legs, a shiver that came from the base of his spine and pooled in his knees. His blood ran cold and he stumbled back, finding the wooden desk chair waiting, as if predestined, to catch him. 

1961, then.  _ Nineteen sixty-one.  _

He didn’t want to believe it. He could have convinced himself that last night was a dream and lead a happy life, never thinking of the bizarre incident again, were it not for the newspaper. 

(Paul realized, in some secluded corner in the back of his mind, that it all made sense, if he were willing to accept the  outrageous , impossible fact that somehow, he found himself more than half a century back in time.  The shop being gone, the bartender acting so strange, the music – if he could look past the fact that under no circumstances would this situation actually occur, Paul could see it explaining why everything yesterday had been so strange.)

He still didn’t want to believe it. 

Paul started at the knock on his door. It wasn’t really a knock, so much as a collision of the door with a fist as it swung violently open – evidently, his dad hadn’t closed it all the way. 

“God, Ritchie,” he began, twisting about in the seat to look at his visitor, “you’ll never believe –”

But the lad in the doorway was  _ not  _ his blue-eyed friend. Paul’s heart sped up  in alarm , as he was sure he’d never seen this boy  before in his life  – and he  _ was  _ a boy; he looked quite a bit younger than Paul, with his youthful f eatures  and thin proportions . 

The stranger had dark hair, brushed back from his forehead in an attempt at a style Paul had never seen anyone seriously pursue. He had dark eyes underneath heavy brows, and before his open-mouthed grin fell to a thin frown, Paul noticed particularly sharp canines that seemed to amplify the boy’s pointed look. 

“– what ‘ appened  last night,” he finished haltingly. 

“D’you just call me  _ Ritchie _ ?” the boy demanded. 

Paul only stared for a moment. “Uh, yes,” he said, because he could say nothing else. 

His unexpected guest let out a long whistle and shoved his hands in his pockets, walking across the room to sit on Paul’s bed like he’d done it a thousand times before (and that same repressed part of Paul thought that maybe, he had). Once he was no longer in the doorway, Paul noticed he had a guitar slung over his back – a detail he’d  at first  overlooked in the shock of seeing the stranger. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Paul, what  _ did  _ happen las’ night?”

“How do you know my name?” Paul asked with slow suspicion. 

He cocked his head. “’Ow do you  _ not  _ know mine?” He pulled his guitar strap over his shoulder and set the instrument on the ground, leaning against his leg. Paul watched every movement with a careful eye. “Look, are you  pullin ’ me leg here?”

Where exactly was Ritchie, then?

Paul just shook his head. “I’ve . . .” He was about to say,  _ I’ve never seen you before _ , but he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. Of course, he wasn’t sure what  _ would  _ be a good idea, but he needed to be careful. “Er,” he grabbed the newspaper from where he’d dropped it on the desk and held it out. “D’you see this?”

The boy squinted for a moment, tilting his head to see what Paul was trying to point out. “I see it, sure,” he reached up to scratch at his head, “but what am I supposed to see  _ in  _ it?”

“Fifth of July, nineteen sixty-one?”

“So? It’s jus’ the paper from the other day, right?”

“ _ Nineteen sixty-one?” _

“The hell are you on about, Paul?”

Paul let out a helpless sigh. “Fuck me,” he breathed. “You’ve got to be  kiddin ’ me.”

“I really don’t get what you’re on about.”

N e rvous and uncomfortable, Paul  couldn’t find a good way to sit. He tried to hold his head in his hands, perhaps to ground him to whatever reality this was, but he only felt the blood pooling there and giving him a headache. He leaned his head back, to try and remedy the problem, but it just strained his neck, so he launched himself off of the seat and took to frantic pacing. 

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.” His voice was rising and the panic was setting in fast. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, man, but you can’t do this to me,” he fixed his heated gaze on the stranger. “You  jus ’ waltz in here, and you act like it’s - like it’s some sort of game, some sort of laugh. I’ve never seen you before, and I don’t know why you’re in my house, and I don’t know why it’s bloody  _ nineteen  _ _ sixty-one,  _ and . . .!”

Surprisingly firm hands gripped his shoulders. “Paul,” came the boy’s soft, level voice  in a cautionary tone . “Paul, just breathe, mate. I don’t understand what’s gotten you all worked up, I jus’ don’t. Can you, maybe, explain what’s ‘ appened ?”

“No, I can’t fuckin’ explain what happened! I don’t know what’s happened!” Taking a deep breath, Paul  looked into those eyes that had seemed so young before, but now seemed so old, and he couldn’t help the way his breathing evened or his heart rate slowed down. 

“I don’t know,” he said tentatively , trying again . “I don’t understand it m y self. And  -” he paused, trying to be honest but polite at the same time “- I don’t  know if I can trust you.”

“Mate, you’ve known me for years.  What’s with you?  ‘Course you can trust me.”

Paul sat back in his chair, the adrenaline from his brief panic fading quickly. “Have I? Can I?”  He hated how desperate he sounded.

“Jus’ tell me.”

“You tell me your name first.”

The boy huffed, not quite seeing the point, but once he realized that he’d get nowhere without it, he said. “George, a’ right? You know me. George Harrison.”

Paul tested the name on his lips to see if he remembered it. “George Harrison.” The name, he could tell, wasn’t the sort he’d said often, or at all. It hardly sounded familiar – but he  _ had  _ heard it before. Or he’d seen it. 

“Oh,  _ fuck no _ ,” he shook his head. First, John Lennon, and now, George Harrison? He had to be dreaming. “This isn’t possible.” That’s it. He’d recently read about the men on their Wikipedia page – and now, the next night, he was dreaming about them. Simple.

“Just calm down and tell me.”

Paul looked into the eyes of this boy, who was supposedly his friend, searching for anything telling him he  _ shouldn’t  _ just  say everything. Because he so desperately wanted to; he couldn’t wrap his own head around what seemed to be happening, and though he wasn’t sure that this lad could, either, it could be worth a shot. If he could be trusted, that is. 

“I - uh, I really don’t know how to say this,” Paul let out a laugh to alleviate the tension. It didn’t work. “God, this is difficult.” He rubbed his hands together, trying to figure out a way to say it without sounding like an absolute madman. Finding his efforts in vain, he just blurted out, “I got hit by a car last night and I don’t know what’s happened.”

George tilted his chin down slightly, keeping his eyes on Paul, and waited for him to continue. After quite a few tense moments and surely audible gulps, he did. 

Dream or not, this George Harrison had a way about him that let Paul ignore that nagging confusion  that clouded his mind.  Talking to him felt like talking to an old friend, as ironic as it seemed, and his monologue came naturally – or as naturally as it could have, given the topic. And as absurd as it was, George kept his face clear of any expression the entire time he talked. 

And, explaining it to someone else made it easier for Paul to wrap his mind around what supposedly happened last night.  Somewhat.  He never explicitly stated that he traveled back in time – to do so would be admitting to something he just wasn’t ready to believe – but he went through no great lengths to hide it.  T e lling him exactly what he had seen, being the perfect witness without injecting any of his suppositions or theories (because they were frankly ridiculous), he  said that his ID didn’t work because  it said  he hadn’t been born yet  without actually stating that he, indeed, had not been born yet  -  but  there was no way George hadn’t pieced it together by now. 

When he finished, he noticed one of George’s eyebrows raised quizzically as his eyes fixed on something and nothing all at once. He looked like he’d seen something grotesque, but couldn’t look away. 

Perhaps Paul had made a mistake.  Had he scared George with his ramblings? Did he seem mad?

“So,” George said finally, “You’re  tellin ’ me that you don’t know me. But  I know you and we’ve been friends for years.” His voice was mostly calm, but Paul thought he could discern a note of lost confusion, the sort that could lead, eventually, to despair. “And your family. Y ou know your da’.”

“Yeah, I saw him las’ night before I went to sleep. He’d waited up. And Mike’s bound to be ‘round here somewhere . . . right?”

George nodded absently. “Yeah. You know your  father  and brother, but . . . what about your mum?”

“No, she’s -” Paul’s back straightened as it occurred to him. “Wait! Is – is my mum here? Do you know her?”

If he really was so far back in time  (which he  _ didn’t _ , but just to give the notion the benefit of the doubt),  and his family was there, too, then that might mean that his mum was  still alive.  She may not have died from cancer – genetics weren’t the only thing that caused  the , he knew, and  even though she must still have been genetically the same person,  perhaps she had smoked, or something, during his lifetime, but in this dream, she hadn’t. 

He also remembered the brief conversation with his father last night. He hadn’t taken notice at the time, but didn’t he say that his mother “worries”, present tense? Did that mean she was just asleep in the master bedroom, instead of buried in her grave?  In dreams,  after all,  what couldn’t happen? Could she still be  here ?

George’s prolonged silence told him enough. “I did, a bit,” he said. Any hope that Paul had found suddenly left and he visibly deflated. 

“Oh.”

There was a silent understanding between the two that established that this line of conversation needed to go no further. 

Paul averted his eyes from George, unwilling to be seen as so openly vulnerable. When he was distressed, he entertained the childish notion that, if you can’t see it, then it can’t see you; if he didn’t look George in the eye, then he wouldn’t show the disappointment and heartache that he was feeling. 

George tactfully shifted the conversation to something of much less gravity.  As they talked, Paul noticed a hesitance about George that seemed to tell him that his ‘friend’ didn’t exactly believe him. Hell, Paul didn’t believe it, either, so he could hardly blame him. 

It was almost awkward to make conversation, once they got around the elephant in the room. It seemed that George wanted to ignore the issue at hand and resume the visit as it normally gone, with a flippant, “Okay, uh, how about we play a bit, then?” and nodded to Paul’s guitar, which was propped in the corner. “You  _ do  _ still play, right?” he asked with some hesitance. 

That told Paul that George didn’t entirely dismiss the story as absurd.  It seemed like an obvious question – of  _ course  _ Paul played the guitar. His music was the sort of thing, he felt, that would follow him wherever – or whenever – he went. But George couldn’t be sure of that until he asked. 

The two fell into playing music after that. It felt forced, to an extent, as he could tell that George was a bit uncomfortable being in such friendly proximity to someone who obviously had never spoken to him before. He was still, it seemed to Paul, skirting around the topic that had so consumed them. 

Paul  had to say he  thankful for the avoidance. 

George would play a piece of a song, and Paul would try to recognize it. He knew about half of them – the bigger ones that made the more lasting impressions on the world of music, evidently.  It became a game of sorts without either of them mentioning its real intention – a test to see just how much had changed under the guise of playing music.  And George was  bloody  good. 

_ Whoever it was who flubbed all those chords on their album _ , Paul found himself thinking,  _ it certainly wasn’t Harrison _ . 

Perhaps he was giving too much away with this little game they were playing. By recognizing certain songs and not others, wasn’t he just telling George which songs would end up standing the test of time? (That is, of course, if George believed him.) There was some sort of time travel  _ rule _  that you didn’t tell people in the past what would happen in the future, right? Not that this bit of information was particularly relevant, granted. 

Paul had to shake himself when he realized that he was buying into this great conspiracy. He  _ hadn’t  _ gone back in time. There was no time travel, and he was angry at himself for almost – for a second – believing that there was. 

But if it wasn’t time travel, what was it?

George noticed that Paul was growing ever more  recalcitrant and  consumed by his thoughts. He looked at his watch and said, “Huh, it’s later than I thought,” though Paul was sure no more than a n hour or so  had passed. 

“Okay, then,” he said. He wasn’t really sure how goodbyes worked between not-friend friends, or how they had worked before (not that there necessarily  _ was  _ a before, since Paul still didn’t think that any of this had really happened to him), so he waited for Harrison to make the next move. 

“Listen, Paul,” he said, slinging his guitar strap over his shoulder. “I’m not sure I get exactly what you just told me, and if I do, I'm not sure I believe it.” 

He appreciated the candor. “To be honest, I’m not sure I believe it, either.”

George nodded. “ Anyroad , you’re me mate, whether or not I'm yours ,” which was said in a matter-of-fact manner that nonetheless told Paul that it hurt George to think it but he wouldn’t admit such a thing, “ and I  wanna  help you, a’ right?”

Paul almost smiled. 

“I don’t know if this is that amnesia  –  _ selective  _ amnesia, ‘parently -  or whatever, that some people get after injuries, and I'm not completely convinced you’re not just  havin ’ me on. But I  _ do  _ wanna  help. I  jus ’ don’t really know how, yeah?”

“I’m not really sure you  _ can _  help,” he said, resigned. “And I’m sorry, y’know, that I don’t know – that I don’t remember you. I’m sorry.”

George  smiled  at him sadly, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be  ‘ round,” he said, before turning his back and leaving. 

Something occurred to Paul. “Wait!” he said, and dived for his bed. 

He heard George walk back into his room, and he could feel the inquisitive eyes on his back as he rummaged through the sheets. “I can prove it,” he said, feeling around, “once I find it. Ha!” He felt his phone and wallet as he ran his hand underneath his pillow, turning about to show George. “This’ll prove that I wasn’t lying.”

He offered the lad his wallet. George flipped it open, eyes flirting over the various cards on display. His eyebrows came together in confusion. 

“That top card, it’s my ID,” Paul explained. “Look at the date.”

“ Says here you were, um, y ou were born in June,” he said, looking up. In a slow, level voice, he continued, “June of 1999.”  After he spoke, George fell deathly silent.

Paul nodded, hoping that George would just say  _ something,  _ but he must have been waiting for the same thing, because his eyes never left Paul’s as he waited for a response.  His expression was unreadable.

“Now, I can’t outright prove that the ID isn’t faked,” he said, feeling a bit uncomfortable under George’s unwavering stare. “But I can show you something that I  _ know  _ you’ve never seen and that I know you  _ can’t  _ explain. This is supposed to be 1961, right?”

Silently, he nodded. 

“Okay.  Um, this is probably the worst thing someone in my situation – if there even  _ is  _ a situation – could do. Maybe a bit of discretion, yeah?” He was rambling nervously, so he decided to steel himself and cut to the chase. “Well, as a final bit of proof,  it’ll be more than fifty years until anyone  hanging ‘round  now would see something like this.”

(He thought, only vaguely, about how he was, in this action, proving the exact theorem to George that he was trying to discredit to himself.  It was an easy thought to dispell. )

Knowing that he was taking a great risk, Paul handed over to George his cracked cell phone. Through the exchange, it remained off, and George merely held it in his hand, looking at the bizarre object. 

“Now, this is taking an awful lot of trust on my part, yeah? Can I trust that you won’t just tell anyone about what I'll show you?”

George only made a noise that Paul took for assent. 

“Okay. Just press that button on the bottom, in the middle, and please don’t drop it.”

~

Paul wrote, in hard, heavy letters at the top of the page, WHAT HAPPENED, then underlined it with a furious stroke that broke the tip of the pencil. 

Not caring about the sharpness or lack thereof, he continued, 

_ -Concussion from car accident (possible) _

_ -Still unconscious from car accident (very possible) _

_ -In coma from car accident (possible but hopefully not likely) _

_ -Part of a prank (possible but unlikely) _

_ -Sent back in time  _

Paul stared at that last line blankly. He wished he hadn’t written it; seeing it on paper made it seem even more absurd, because written things were supposed to be  _ serious,  _ they were supposed to be  _ purposeful _ . There was no purpose in writing it because it was very much  _ not  _ possible. 

Still, something in him stopped him from crossing it out. 

Deciding no longer to dwell that particular detail, he chose to move on to WHAT CHANGED, drawing a harsh line underneath it as well. 

_ -Record shop; pub now (perhaps I should return to make sure it was the right place?) _

_ -Everyone thinks it’s 1961 ~~(or maybe it~~ _ ~~ is  _1961)_ ~~

_ -Different furniture, same  _ _ house, same  _ _ family (still haven’t seen Mike yet; George confirmed he’s here) _

_ -Silver Beatles (Lennon and Harrison, at any rate) _

Paul halted at the last. Was it really fitting in that section? After all, he didn’t know if they had, in fact, changed. Perhaps they were just as they should have been – sans Paul, of course. Maybe this George Harrison  already played with the Silver Beatles, and the Paul in this twisted reality was just his friend. 

If he was the friend of George Harrison, though, and George Harrison was in a band with John Lennon, shouldn’t George’s Paul have crossed paths with Lennon before now?  Sh ouldn’t he  have been r ecognized  last night ?

It occurred to Paul that he didn’t know exactly when everything happened with those Silver Beatles. Maybe they  _ didn’t  _ know each other yet. Maybe they weren’t the Silver Beatles yet. 

(Or maybe this is all some mad dream and he should stop worrying about it!)

He wouldn’t be able to figure out that piece of the puzzle without speaking to either of the prospective(?) band members, so he moved on to his next underlined section: HOW TO FIX IT

_ -If concussed: wait it out (don’t worry father, don’t go to any doctors) _

_ -If asleep: wake up (easier said than done) _

He saw that this plan didn’t give him much in the way of a step-by-step. Either way, he essentially just had to wait to become mentally sound or conscious (and if he wasn’t yet, then this was by far the most lucid dream he had ever had). 

He told himself that his next point was written with the sole intention of humoring that conspirator part of his brain that couldn’t let go of that festering thought:

_ -If time travel: _

As he thought of what to say, he realized that this was truly the only part of his mental regurgitation onto paper that he could actually put into any sort of strict guideline. It both encouraged and discouraged him: he  would finally be able to set out a plan, but it was a plan for the only situation that he ruled out to be impossible. 

IF TIME TRAVEL, he wrote in a section of its own. 

_ -Tell no-one (George had been enough of a mess) _

And, indeed, he had. 

Paul grimaced as he remembered the look on George’s face when his thumb pressed into the round button on the phone; it was the first truly understandable reaction he’d seen from the lad, granted, but understandable didn’t mean  _ good _ . 

He was  thankful that  he’d expected George to drop the phone, because nothing, not even the warning, could have stopped his sudden loss of control once the screen blinked to life. Paul could see it in his face; in the moment it took before he dropped the phone, his expression changed from that of skepticism to surprise, then to confusion – it remained there for the longest, Paul felt, but even that was just a fraction of a second – before it settled on something that could have been nausea, disgust, or abject horror. 

The second that Paul caught his phone, he knew that showing George had been a mistake. No – telling him anything  in the first place  had been a mistake. He should have feigned illness; he certainly could have done it, with how out of sorts he’d felt last night, and how uneasy his morning revelation had made him for the rest of the day , to avoid their little meeting . But nothing could have prevented that outstanding lack of foresight. 

George had dropped the phone, taken two steps back, his face pale, before scampering out of the room in a rush.  He wanted so badly  _ not  _ to be compulsively honest. 

_ -Show no-one the phone or wallet (this includes “family”, if they were, indeed, family) _

_ -Say nothing about what will happen in the future _

_ -Stop no event that is supposed to happen _

_ -Ask no questions that “Paul” should  _ _ already  _ _ know (including to family) _

His next point was going to be something to the effect of ‘change nothing’, different from above in that it would not only be preventing a certain scenario, but causing one. Something made him reconsider.

This wasn’t like the time travel he’d seen in movies. Marty McFly didn’t go back in time to find his parents the same age as  they were  when he left. Why did he go back in time (if that is really what it was) to a place where his parents and brother were still his family? Where people knew his name?

It was almost as if he’d  _ replaced  _ some other Paul McCartney, whose entire family was just set back a couple of generations. A Paul who had his own life here, his own friends, his own family (who were, despite how similar they may seem upon first glance, simply not the same).

Writing the list, Paul began to almost believe this theory. With that belief came the feeling that he was usurping some other man’s life and position. He was not the same Paul McCartney that George knew; he wasn’t the same man who lived in this room, slept in this bed every night, sat at this desk every day. This wasn’t where Paul belonged. 

His father, who’d left him a note that they’d gone to the shops sometime after George arrived, had more or less lost his son and gained, well,  _ him _ . He was the same person, physically, but he’d had completely different experiences than the son his father had raised. He wasn’t the same brother to the same Mike. 

It was more comforting to think that this was all some sort of amnesia, as George had conjectured. 

But amnesiacs only forgot things, didn’t they? Paul didn’t think that they came up with entirely alternate lives. 

And he thought of Ritchie, too, and wondered where he was. Had he come out of the car accident unscathed? Paul had never hoped for anything more in his life. He hadn’t seen his friend last night during his almost-drunken wanderings, and of course, there was no cellular reception in fucking  _ nineteen sixty-one  _ from which to call him. 

He wanted to think that Ritchie was back home, possibly worrying over his friend, Paul, who was locked in some hospital ward, still out from an unfortunate accident. He wanted to believe that this was all a dream and that he’d wake up to find everything back the way it used to be . . . or would be. 

Paul looked down at the paper he’d littered with his deranged scribbles and folded it with  resignation,  stuffing it into his wallet, where he hoped nobody would snoop around. He didn’t know what he was going to do. 

* * *

So, guys, what d'you think? I dunno, but something makes me slightly nervous to post this chapter. Maybe it's just the pivotal event/reveal to George? Please let me know your thoughts and thanks for reading!

 


	4. Letters in the Sand

A knock at his door woke him from the daydream he had fallen into. Quickly, Paul shoved the pages he’d scribbled on into his drawer and slid it shut before calling, “Yeah?”

The door creaked open, echoing the hesitance of the knocker to enter. Turning, Paul noticed it was his father. 

“Hey, Da’,” he said, wondering at the worried expression on his aged face. 

“Son,” he greeted, resigning himself to stand in the middle of the room, hands clasped tightly in front of him, looking quite clearly awkward. “How you  doin ’?”

Paul shrugged as though he weren’t in the middle of an existential crisis  and tried to look relaxed . “Better, I guess.”

Jim nodded. He didn’t look used to this sort of talk – conversation for the point of conversation, with an end goal of  just  knowing what the other wants to say, rather than knowing what the other thinks they need from the shops or when dinner will be on. Real heart-to-heart talk was obviously not the norm in this McCartney household.

“George help a ny ?” he asked, shuffling on his feet. “Puttin’ you at ease after yesterday an’ all?”

Because he didn’t particularly like lying, Paul said, “Not really,” but didn’t explain further.  

“I wanted to send ‘ im  off,” he said, expecting him to argue at that, but Paul just listened. “Thought you needed your rest. But we had to go to the shops, see, and I didn’t like  lettin ’ you alone, since you were in that accident, since . . . since you were  _ hit by a car  _ las’ night . . .”  Paul could tell this was difficult for his father.

“Dad,” Paul said, hopefully reassuringly, “I wasn’t  _ hit  _ by a car. I got  outta  the way and hit the sidewalk, like I told you.” He wasn’t sure if that was entirely true, but  it wasn’t entirely  _ un _ true, either, and  that night was very much a haze of confusion to him, so he saw no harm in easing his father’s mind, since it didn’t matter either way. 

“Either way,” he continued, “you got me worried, son.  But  I couldn’t sen d  your brother to the shops ; y 'know he’d just spend the change on junk. That’s why I let your friend up, y’see,  ‘cause  I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“Thanks.”

“After you went up to bed las’ night,” Jim confessed, “I came up here to check on you. Tried to wake you up,  y’know ,  ‘cause  I thought you may’ve hit your head – and that wouldn’t have been good. I thought you may’ve needed the hospital. But I couldn’t wake you up for a long time, and when I could, you jus’ mumbled somethin’ and went back to sleep. Got me real worried.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’m fine now.”

“Sure?” After he nodded, his father continued, “You still look tired.”

“I am, I guess.”

“Good thing it’s the weekend, I suppose. Gives you time to rest ‘fore  goin ’ back to work.” 

At that, Paul paled. Work. He had a job here? He didn’t know where ‘he’ supposedly worked, didn’t know his bosses, didn’t know  _ anything _ . How was he supposed to find out where he worked without giving away the fact that he had no idea what was going on?

“Oh, don’t worry about it, son,” his father said , seeing his distress . “I get you’re out of sorts now, but you’ll be sorted out come Monday. And if you’re not, call in. God knows you deserve a break with how hard they’re working you.”

Paul nodded, still trying to decide what he’d do about his job situation.  He couldn’t very well just  _ ask  _ where he worked – that was definitely something the Paul he was supposed to be should know. 

After a lengthy silence,  Jim prepared to leave, but Paul remembered something about their exchange the night before. 

“Wait, Dad, before you leave,” he called hesitantly. “Um, earlier, you said that, when I stay out late,  that  I, uh, I worry mum.”

His father froze. 

“ What did you mean,  I  _ worry  _ her?”

It was an innocent enough question, Paul figured, that he wouldn’t set off too many red flags by asking. He already knew, from George, that his mother –  _ this  _ Paul’s mother, at any rate – was, in fact, dead. Unless he misunderstood something, his father shouldn’t have used the present tense. 

Jim sighed. It was a long sigh, fraught with emotions that he wasn’t comfortable voicing. Turning back to face Paul, he sat on his son’s bed and put his hands on his knees, as if bracing himself. 

This was the most vulnerable Paul had seen his father – any version of him – since his mother had actually passed. For a moment, Paul wondered if he hadn’t opened the wrong can of beans in stirring up old memories. 

“Your aunt tells me the same,” he said quietly after several long moments. Paul didn’t ask which aunt he meant. “I need to accept it, she says. Move on.” He took another long pause. “I really am sorry, son, that it bothers you  -”

“No, Da’, it’s fine, I was just -”

“-but I really do feel that she’s there,” he went on, ignoring Paul’s interruption. “I feel ‘ er  here, sometimes, when the house is quiet and I'm alone. When I don’t know where you are, or when you’ll be back.” He chuckled humorlessly, closing his eyes. “It’s her who’s  worryin ’ me, really. She’s the one  worryin ’ ‘bout you and it’s just pushed on  t’me .”

Paul opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out, and he just looked at Jim with eyes full of empathy and loss. 

This wasn’t Paul’s father. He was too gruff, too stand-offish. Paul’s father was warm and openly affectionate. He wasn’t quite sociable, but could carry a conversation well enough. But Paul knew that, even if this man wasn’t his father, in a sense, he was very much the same man who lost his wife,  his son’s mother,  Paul’s mother or otherwise. Wordlessly, he got up from his chair and moved to sit next to Jim McCartney on the bed, close enough to feel his presence beside him but not close enough to touch, which was all he needed. 

~

To tackle his hastily scribbled list of objectives, Paul had tried a few things to wake himself up. 

Firstly, he attempted the thing that always pulled him from sleep, no matter how deep. 

From different heights, he tried to simulate the sensation of falling. He jumped from his bed, first, and got nothing. Then, he leapt down the stairs from the fifth step from the floor; aside from a bruised knee, he got nothing once more. Eventually, after skinning his calf through his jeans as he tumbled from the tree in his backyard, he gave up on that attempt. 

_ -If asleep: cannot wake up _ . 

He was currently busy tackling his first objective  of  waiting out the confusion of a possible concussion, which seemed, with each passing hour, a less and less likely explanation. This was no all-consuming task, and since he, under no circumstances, wanted to let his mind wander, he set himself to letting his feet do the wandering, instead. 

This was how he found himself , in the broad daylight of four o’clock the following afternoon,  standing in front of The Cavern, which looked much lonelier in broad daylight than it had two nights before. Like most pubs, it didn’t attract the younger crowd during the day; instead, it got the sulking middle-aged men out of work or the elderly, to whom four in the afternoon was quite late to be out indeed. 

Paul didn’t go in; he had no money, for one, and he was still  _ very much _  underage, from a strictly legal standpoint. Furthermore, he had no interest in actually drinking.

He had hoped, on the walk over, that he’d been mistaken  before . Perhaps, he let himself think, he’d taken a wrong turn, and  had no t  been  in the same place as the record shop at all. Taking great care to follow the proper path, however, Paul was disappointed but not surprised to find that the record shop was, indeed, no more. 

Well, it wasn’t ‘no more’ quite yet – it just wasn’t. 

After standing in front of The Cavern for what must have seemed a suspiciously long time to the patrons inside, Paul decided not to look aimless by standing; it was better to sit and do the same. People sitting, oddly enough, looked to have more of a purpose than people standing .

He was tapping his foot to the beat of some song or other that he couldn’t be bothered to identify when, quite suddenly, a shadow overcame him. He didn’t want to look at who it was, at first,  partly hoping it was just a passing pedestrian, and partly  for fear of who he’d find, but as it turned out, he didn’t need to. 

Paul felt  someone’s  breath sweeping against his ear and cheek. Before he could even properly tense his muscles in alarm, the stranger spoke. 

“Hey, I know you, don’ I, mate?”

The voice was loud and scratchy, rude and obnoxious. It set his already unsteady nerves alight; he might have recognized the voice if he hadn’t been so startled by its volume and proximity. 

“What the . . . !” Paul took in a panicked breath, spinning around and putting some distance between him and the not-so-stranger. “Oh,” he breathed in a sigh that, while not quite relieved, was more relaxed. “It’s you.”

“Me,” John Lennon said, grinning from ear to ear, leaning his arms against the back of the bench. “But still not that McClean fella. Sorry to disappoint.”

It was a silly thing, that grin. He stuck his chin out ever so slightly and widened his eyes, and with a few more lines on his face,  Paul thought  he could have looked like a gargoyle .  But soon, it simply turned into a smile – the sort a person gets from a genuine contentment. The gentle upturn of the lips, the crinkle in the corner of the eye, the slightest hint of a dimple on his cheek. 

Paul shook himself when he realized he had been staring too long at the man’s face. He turned away, back to the street, and expected John to back away  in silent dismissal , to get the hint that he was in no mood for conversation. 

He  had  no such luck; he could still feel John’s heat behind him and saw  the shadow he  cast upon the ground. Maybe he was like a gargoyle, Paul mused grudgingly, always looming. 

“Something tells me you’re not pleased to see me,” said John in a lower tone than before. Paul hated that it sounded good to his ears – if he weren’t so annoyed with the man’s presence in the first place, he might have allowed himself to shiver. 

“I  _ wonder _  what,” Paul replied, not bothering to be polite, and adding a bit more venom than was probably necessary. He just wanted John to leave him alone; he wanted to talk to as few people as seldom as possible until he figured out how to fix his conundrum. Secrecy was, perhaps, the most important part, he knew, since the wrong word to the wrong person could hand him in an even more unfortunate situation. “I ’m sorry, but I  just want to be left alone.”

John  ignored his request and  chuckled,  which  sent even more hot air brushing against his neck. This time, Paul couldn’t repress the shiver. He tried to mask it with a shake of his head, but he wasn’t sure if it worked. 

Everything he did seemed to egg John on  instead of brush him off . “What’re you  doin ’ here,  anyroad ?”

Paul sighed. “I’m sitting; what does it look like? D’you need glasses?” He wasn’t usually this rude, honestly; only to his brother was he ever so outright mean, but he very desperately did not want to talk to John Lennon. 

He scowled in defense, though almost imperceptibly, and Paul thought that he  _ might ha _ ve needed glasses. He seemed to have hit a sore spot.  It didn’t bother him enough to leave,  though,  unfortunately for Paul. 

“What are you even doing here?” he asked him in turn, careful to sound as annoyed as possible. 

John leaned back just a bit, placing a hand on his chest. “I fuckin’ live  ‘ ere,” he said with a dramatic, insulted gasp. “This is me bench. Home, sweet home.” He gazed down and shook his head in false fondness, “I sleep here and I eat here and I shit here.” He looked up and leaned into Paul to say, threateningly, “And you’re trespassin’.”

Paul scoffed at the man’s antics, but had to look away to hide the grin that threatened to pull up the corner of his lips.  He hoped John hadn’t noticed.

“What’s your name, then?” John asked. “I never caught it. And it’s hardly fair,  y’know ,  seein ’ as you know mine, an’ all.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he answered, “Paul.”

John nodded, as if his name  somehow  made sense. “Paul. Got a last name?”

“Yes.”

Expectantly, he urged, “And? What is it, then?”

Paul didn’t answer; he rolled his eyes and looked back to the road. 

Before he could blink, John had swung himself around the bench and slid onto it, practically barreling into – no, on  _ top _  of – Paul. He huffed from the collision and didn’t appreciate the uncomfortable warmth it added to his side; it was summer, after all, and the sun was ever so slightly less shy than usual. 

“Well, Paul with the last name, what were you  doin ’,  mopin ’ about?” He nudged his shoulder, something that Paul wouldn’t have thought possible, considering their nearness already. “Did you forget  somethin ’ when you ran out so fast the other day?”

Paul crossed his arms so that they weren’t relaxed by his sides; this put a bit more space between him and John. “I wasn’t moping,” he protested. “I wasn’t really doing anything. It was just my . . .  my bad  bad luck that we ran into each other, I guess.”

That made him laugh. “Bad luck? Me?” he shook his head. “I’m the best thing that could ever  ‘ appen to you – to anybody.”

Well, he was certainly humble. “You haven’t  _ happened _  to me at all,”  Paul  shot down. “I don’t know you and I don’t want to.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” he said with the raise of an eyebrow. 

Paul blanched. Nothing he was doing could effectively put an end to this  possibly catastrophic  conversation. He stood suddenly and furiously, John having gotten on his last nerve, and clenched his fists at his sides, glaring fiercely. “Fine, then,” he seethed. “I can tell you won’t just  _ leave me alone _ . So have fun with your, your,” he stuttered, not accustomed, per se, to telling people off, “your sad little bench and I won’t invade the privacy of your  _ home _  any longer.”

He turned on his heel and walked briskly in the direction of his home, praying that John had finally gotten the hint. A part of him knew, however, that he’d gotten the hint long ago and just chose to ignore it. 

It seemed he was right. 

“That’s no way to talk to the guy who took pity on you an ’  your loneliness  to  b uy  you a drink,” John said, easily matching Paul’s stride. He rested his hands leisurely in his pockets and sauntered beside him. 

“You’ll remember I never asked you to do that. I wish you hadn’t.”

John shrugged. “We don’t always get what we want.”

Before they had made it far from the bench,  Paul stopped and faced him. He knew he wasn’t particularly formidable, as far as looks went, with his youthful features that looked more feminine than manly,  more slight than strong,  but he hoped he could get his message across all the same. “Yeah? And what exactly  d’you  want, following me ‘round when I so clearly don’t want the company?”

John stepped closer to him. Paul noticed that they were around the same height – John only looked taller, from a greater distance, because his shoulders were broader, and he held himself with a sort of confidence that was larger than himself.  He tried not to shrink away.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I want to know,” he began, “why you left the pub the other night, jus’ like I said before. I want to know why my name got you so worked up.”

Paul  _ had  _ left rather hastily when the man introduced himself, he realized. That must’ve been more than suspicious.  “What?” he feigned ignorance. “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

John hummed. “I think you do. And if you really want me off your tail, you’ll tell me.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but unless you want me to lie, then I can’t tell you.” That, at least, was no lie at all, unless there was a considerable difference between the words  _ can’t _  and  _ won’t _ , which Paul didn’t think there was. 

Letting out a dry chuckle, John looked off to the side, shook his head, and turned back to him. “I’m a man of my word,  y’know .  So  you can trust me when I tell you, Paul with the Last Name, that I’ll find out what you’re hiding, somehow.”

It was important to shrug as if he were not hiding skeletons in his closet, so Paul adopted a nonchalance that may or may not have been convincing – his nerves were too active to really tell. “It’s your decision if you want to waste your time  lookin ’ for things that aren’t there.”

John Lennon smirked and appeared to say something, before deciding against it, and held back, only sending Paul a wink (which definitely did  _ not _  make his heart flutter dangerously) before backing away. 

~

Paul was pleased to find that passing the week normally (by the definition of ‘normal’ that stood in 1961) was easier than he feared it would be. 

He had spent much of his time in his bedroom over the weekend, which felt far shorter than two days. He decided that he could not pursue any plan to return to his own ‘normalcy’ until he was well-rested and enjoyed clarity of thought, and his room was the best place to do so. His father never interrupted him, after their brief discussion Saturday afternoon, and his brother, Mike, was apparently so apathetic to everything related to Paul that he couldn’t be bothered to enter the room. 

Paul didn’t mind that. He savored the solitude. 

But the bedroom offered him much more than a respite from his family and the rest of the world; in some cases, it gave him answers. 

On Sunday night, as he dug through his closet for a t-shirt to wear to sleep, Paul came across a dark blue button-down hanging next to well-worn khakis. Over the breast pocket was embroidered  _ McGinty’s Mechanics _  in plain white lettering, and clipped to the collar rather haphazardly was a nametag with his name. 

Grinning to himself, Paul silently rejoiced; he now knew where he worked. Originally, he’d planned to feign illness Monday morning to buy himself more time to understand the job predicament, but that was no longer necessary. 

After finding his uniform shirt, he grew restless with relief. His mind reeled with renewed possibilities. Solidifying his position at the job he was supposed to work all the time would assure the watchful eyes of his father – and anyone else who could notice the sudden change in Paul’s behavior – that there was nothing to worry over. Once suspicions were thoroughly put to rest, he would be free to explore possible solutions to his predicament. Putting a foot in the shoe of the man he was supposed to be felt like a leash being taken from around his neck; he still had the collar, which would probably remain until he was back home, but no lead.

That night, he’d flipped through ‘Paul’s impressive collection of records, mostly blues and rock. He recognized many of the artists, which was certainly a good thing: Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and, of course, Elvis. If it weren’t so late at night and he hadn’t feared waking his father, Paul would have played a few of his favorites. 

Then, he looked through the books on the shelf. Most were textbooks, undoubtedly left over from his schooling days, and notebooks, with scribbles of this or that in them. He was surprised to find several with what appeared to be poems in them. 

After reading some of the lines ‘he’ had written sometime in the past, an uneasy feeling spread throughout his middle and forced him to close the notebook and place it back on the shelf. He felt quite as if he were prying into someone else’s private thoughts - which he undoubtedly was, from one perspective. He hadn’t written those words. The poems, personal and emotional, were very close to a person whose body Paul now occupied, but whose mind remained a mystery to him. 

They were the ramblings of a madman, anyway, for how much sense they made; Paul wouldn’t have been able to glean any useful information from them even if he did read them all. 

What did help him was ‘Paul’s journal, which had been locked in the drawer that now held his phone and wallet. 

‘He’ had been pretty bad at keeping this journal, Paul found. His entries were so infrequent that one book of moderate size held entries from April of 1956 to the most recent, February of 1961, without  even  taking up  most of the  pages.  

He felt guilty about reading these, as well, but since they were written in prose instead of verse, and formed coherent sentences, it had great enough probative value to outweigh the breach of privacy. The way Paul saw it, reading the journal was no worse than any lawful search and seizure. 

The first entries were no more than reminders from the past Paul to the slightly more recent past Paul (well, the past  _ past _ __ Paul, that is). He had to make sure his father kept an appointment with the bank on the 14 th , for example, and wish his aging aunt a happy birthday the following week. He apparently hadn’t believed in the diary functions of this journal. 

Later on, though, the writing changed. Passages became longer when he got to Halloween night  of 1956 . He didn’t have to read it to know what it was about. 

_ They won’t tell me why. I knew she was sick, but nobody said how bad, and they won’t tell us what it was. I get Dad hiding it from Mike, he’s so young, but I’m not. Dad won’t say it and the rest of the family is just as quiet as he is. I think he won’t say it because it’s hard to say something like that aloud.  _ She died of consumption _ , maybe,  _ _ would _ __ _ be  _ _ an easy enough thing to say, if  _ _ only  _ _ he didn’t have to say  _ she died _. I think saying it just makes it more real. He cried, though, which seems real enough to me. I can’t stand to see him cry, and I can’t stand to hear it. That’s why I’m up here writing this. I don’t want to hear his infectious weeping and start it too.  _

It  unnerved Paul to see the handwriting progress from ‘neat enough’ to ‘barely legible’, just as it always had when he was younger.  It was undoubtedly  _ his _  handwriting.  How old must he have been, fourteen? Maybe fifteen?

Focusing on the handwriting was an attempt to ignore the emotions that this roused in him. It wasn’t working, he knew, when he felt tears well in his eyes, so he flipped the page and reading just a bit of each entry. 

_ November 4 – Mike asked what the point of a funeral was and I don’t know how to answer.  _

_ December 18 – Christmas is a mess without mum here to cook.  _

_ December 27 – Finally, the Aunt’s gone back home. She’s nagged us _ __ _ about cleaning the counters _ _  all week _ _.  _

(Barely readable)  _ February 8 – Bored at school, practicing right hand. Sloppy.  _

_ February 9 – I got a cramp in my thumb. Giving up ambidexterity.  _

_ May 4 – Remember to stop by that mechanic shop and ask for a job. Dad says we need more money for bills.  _

_ July 5 – Ivan wants me to go to some fete with him, but Mike’s caught a cold, and Dad’s making me stay in. Can’t sneak out; Mike snitched last time.  _

_ September 17 – I finally saved up enough to get that left-handed guitar at the shops but George tells me it’s been sold.  _

_ September 18 – George is a liar.  _

At each mention of a name, Paul made a mental note to keep track of further mentions of them in the journal. George was mentioned several times, along with someone called Ivan, Dot, and several distant family members. He learned a bit about each of them, proving the notebook to be invaluable. 

He read well into the night. Once he was through with all of the entries, his eyes were exhausted and heavy-lidded, but he was much more prepared for the days ahead. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to believe, without a doubt, that he was somehow stuck in the life of a teenager with his own name and face who lived sixty years prior, there was no harm in being prepared to live that life, for however long it takes to get back. 

* * *

Well? We saw John again, as well as ol' Father McCartney, and Paul's starting to kinda sort himself out. Please share your thoughts below, and thanks for reading!

 


	5. More Things In Heaven And Earth

Paul was the sort of person who needed to always have a plan. He needed a next step to look forward to; he needed a goal to pursue, a level to reach, a number to count down from. Back in school, his gym teacher told the class to do as many push-ups as they could; Paul found this remarkably challenging, not because o f  the physical strain, but because he did not know what number to set as his maximum .

He found that, if he were damned to Hell, his present situation was exactly the sort of infernally torturous scenario his immortal soul would be condemned to. 

H e didn’t know when, or how, he could proceed in his quest to return ‘home’,  but  he knew he had to count  _ something _ . And, if he couldn’t count down the days until he returns, he could do the next best thing: count the days since he arrived. 

Day number eleven, a warm( ish ) but cloudy Tuesday, found Paul attentively stacking the shelves at McGinty’s. The first Monday of his vacation in 1961 had brought him luck: it was raining heavily. Since he didn’t recognize the name of the shop  stitched onto his uniform , he didn’t know the way there, or what it even sold. The rain gave him the perfect excuse to ask his father for a ride that morning, saving him the awkward questions that he certainly should have known the answer to. 

He, thankfully, did not have a particularly specialized or challenging job. McGinty’s was a small  mechanics shop and  hardware s tore  with two employees scheduled for each shift; Paul discovered that he worked from eight every morning to six every evening, alternately stocking shelves and checking customers. In all, it wasn’t so different from his job at the record shop; the main difference was in items sold, not duties performed. 

Granted, he did know a bit more about records than he did nuts and bolts; the only flaws in his guise of normalcy came when a customer  asked a specific question that he simply couldn’t answer because of his hardware ineptitude. 

From the journal, Paul recognized the  nametag  of his boss, Mr. Crane, an elderly and mostly deaf man who seemed to exist only to open shop in the morning and close in the evenings. Otherwise, he was closed up in a stuffy office in the back pouring over books and logs for hours, leaving Paul and whichever other employee shared his shift to deal with customers. 

He also recognized a few of his co-workers. He knew Matthew, from the journal, as the guy who once stole a piece of piping, and whom Paul guiltily neglected to report, because he was easily the largest  and most intimidating  man Paul had ever seen. Joe , meanwhile,  was never punctual and slept most of his shift. Theodore, or Ted, had a terrible speech impediment, and Paul usually had to repeat what he said to customers. 

All in all, it wasn’t a terrible job. 

But it wasn’t great, either. 

The best thing that had happened in the week or so that Paul had been ‘here’ (insomuch as he was in a ‘different’ place) was probably the unexpectedly advantageous discovery that he was bad with names. 

It first happened when his neighbor was a patron of the shop. Paul had seen him a few mornings, checking the paper, as he left for work. He walked in and waved amicably at Paul, who simply smiled back, hoping that no long exchange of pleasantries were necessary, because he didn’t know the man’s name. 

“ How’ya  been, Paul?” the man asked once he was ready to pay. 

“Oh, I’ve been just fine, sir,” Paul said, careful not to  _ sound  _ like he didn’t know who he was talking to. 

“Don’ be so formal, lad,” he waved. “You’re bad with names, I know, but you can call me Tom, yeah?”

Paul grinned. “Well, I’ll try to remember for next time.”

Being ‘bad with names’ excused him from addressing people he was supposed to know. If he passed another neighbor on the street, he could call them ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’, if necessary, and the only thing they may wonder is why he was being so polite, but it raised no suspicions. Sooner or later, he would hear somebody else use their actual name, at which point Paul would commit it to memory and act like he used it all the time. 

This trick didn’t do much good for him when the shop had no customers, however, and Joey was asleep at the register. On this particular Tuesday, Paul could almost have fallen asleep himself out of sheer boredom, but the sound of the door opening made him jump to alertness. 

He automatically moved toward Joe, so a customer wouldn’t see him asleep on the job, when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a familiar figure standing in the doorway. 

He froze. 

“Hey, Paul,” George Harrison said. 

Paul stared, wide-eyed. He hadn’t seen the  lad  in over a week, since he foolishly revealed to him his . . . predicament. He expected never to see George again; after all, Paul must have seem dangerously deranged, what with his madman’s ramblings, to begin with. The proof he offered in the form of his mobile phone must only have been icing on the cake of scaring George away. 

“I, er,” George began, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I wanna apologize, y’know, for running off so suddenly. Last week.”

Paul was silent, still staring. He admittedly didn’t know George very well, but from his impressions, he was very self-assured and collected. The boy in front of him did not hold the same demeanor; his lack of  surety  made Paul think that his apology was genuine – George must not have been the sort to apologize often, and it showed. 

Odder still, he held a paper basket lined with newspaper and filled with chips. 

All he could think to say was, “It’s fine.”

He cast a quick glance to Joe, ensuring that he was still fast asleep; he didn’t know what all George had come to say, but almost subject wouldn’t be suitable for such an audience. 

“I, well, I was hoping I could talk t’you.”

Paul nodded. He wiped his hands on the cloth he’d been using to dust the shelves and set it on the counter. “Okay. You’re the only customer we’ve ‘ad in hours, and y’aren’t even a really a customer, so there’s no harm in a break.”

He smiled in relief. Poking a thumb over his shoulder, he said, “How about outside?”

Paul sent one more glance to Joey before following George out the door. 

“I bought these along the way,” George said, proffering the chips. “I know you like ‘em. Or, well, used to, I guess.”

He had been getting hungry, he supposed. Grinning in thanks, Paul took one and said, “Who doesn’t? Thanks.”

They ate for a moment. Paul wondered if George wanted to put of f  their conversation as long as possible – the topic certainly couldn’t be light, after all. 

“So, what favor is this food supposed to buy you?” Paul asked to diffuse the tension. “I’m not  givin ’ you any future technology or  anythin ’. That’s strictly prohibited by the, uh, Order of Time  Travelers ,  y’know .”

George eyed him for a moment. 

“Joking,” Paul said indulgently, just in case he didn’t know.

He nodded, like it was obvious. “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s just . . . It’s all kinda crazy, innit?”

“Does this mean you believe me?”

“Does this mean you really think you’ve travelled in time?”

Paul couldn’t honestly say ‘yes’. “I still don’t know what to believe. I mean, it’s impossible, right? I’m not convinced this isn’t just some great dream.”

“If you’re dreaming, then I am, too. That . . . thing, whatever it was, that you showed me -”

“The cell phone.”

“- just isn’t something you can explain!” He paused. “Phone, you said?”

“Yeah. Makes calls, yeah? It’s like a really, really small, uh, computer.” They had computers, right? The ones the size of entire rooms, with bugs that were literally bugs and only the simplest of functions? 

George whistled. “All I know is, that was one really clear picture of, what, a frog? on that little screen.”

Paul chuckled. “Yeah, it takes photos, too. It was a lizard, actually, on the windowsill one morning.”

He still had that habitual urge to grab his phone from his back pocket when it was mentioned, but he remembered that he’d locked it in his  desk drawer, after turning it off to conserve the battery in the absence of a charger. He must’ve just looked like he needed to scratch his  arse . 

Paul had taken to locking his phone and old wallet – that is, the one that he brought with him, not the one from 1961 – in his desk drawer. That first Sunday, he’d powered off his phone, wishing to preserve the remaining forty percent of battery it had left; he had no way to charge it back if it died. Of course, he also didn’t know under what circumstances he’d  _ need  _ his phone before he could get back, but the battery was one of those nostalgic things that he simply was not ready to give up yet. 

“Look,” he said after George had been silent for far too long, “I’m sorry for freaking you out with all this . . . stuff. It’s insane, I know, and I probably shouldn’t’ve said  anythin ’ to you about it, since I  even  don’t get it myself, and it must all’ve seemed so -”

“Look, you don’ need to apologize, Paul,” he interrupted. “I can tell you’re stressed enough with this as it is. Maybe you shouldn’t’ve told me, yeah, but you did, and you shouldn’t regret it. I’m yo ur  friend – or I was – and I’m gonna help you, insane or not.”

How could he help Paul when neither of them even knew what was wrong? Well, perhaps they knew  _ what,  _ but not  _ why _ . “George, I really couldn’t ask you to -”

“And you didn’t need to.” He placed a steadying hand on Paul’s shoulder. “As shocking as this was for me, it must’ve given you a fuckin’ heart attack. I can’t imagine it. And if you won’t tell anyone  else  – a decision I would definitely support, by the way – then you need  _ somebody  _ to know. If you aren’t mad now, you will be if you have to deal with this on your own.”

Paul let out a dry chuckle. “Gee, you really know how to cheer a guy up.”

He flashed a bright, cheeky smile. “Well, what else am I here for?”

He nodded, smiling. 

George dug a pack of smokes out of his back pocket and fumbled around for a lighter. Upon finding it, he raised the cigarette to his lips and lit it; Paul only watched this with a vague expression. He didn’t smoke, himself, and never particularly minded when others did, so long as they did it outside, but he’d noticed that a noticeably larger proportion of the population smoked a noticeably larger amount of cigarettes. 

“Want one?” he offered. Paul politely refused. 

It wasn’t something that surprised him, but it wasn’t a nice thing to realize. It would be a few decades until smoking was more widely discouraged, so while Paul had grown up with the dangers of smoking ingrained in his memory, nobody here had. He couldn’t say anything, of course – it would be like going to royal court in the seventeenth century and saying that bloodletting wasn’t good medicinal practice. It would be useless. 

He didn’t have to like it, though, or do it himself. 

Something  occurred to him. “Excuse the dumb question, but, are you younger than me?”

George paused for a moment, as if considering the answer to what should be a simple question, and Paul thought he saw a flicker of mischief in his  sharp  eye. “No, actually. I’m two years older.”

Something about that look told Paul not to trust him. “Oh, come off it. You look like a kid.”

He scoffed indignantly. “Do not!” At Paul’s raised eyebrow, he said, “All right. A year younger. But you’d not’ve known if I hadn’t told you.”

“Yeah, right.” Paul shook his head. There was a moment’s silence, in which both of them just looked out on the streets – the people walking by, the passing vehicles. 

“I  _ am  _ sorry for Saturday, though,” George said after a while. Paul was about to tell him not to apologize, but he continued, “I think that I might’ve taken it better if you  _ just  _ told me. Or if you’d  _ just  _ shown me  your license, or if you’d  _ just _  had  that . . . phone thing. But together, mate, it was jus’ too much, yeah?”

Paul sucked in a breath and nodded. “Yeah.”

“I mean, I ‘ad no time to,  er , really consider what you were  tellin ’ me. It was jus’ too different. Too overwhelming.  And I wasn’t sure I believed you, really, ‘til just now,  ‘cause  I didn’t know if you believed yourself. ”

“No, no, George,” Paul assured, “It wasn’t your fault at all. It was mine. I shouldn’t’ve told anyone ‘bout any of this – I’m just now accepting that this whole thing may not be some crazy dream.  And,  er , n ot to assume anythin’ , but  I think that, uh,  _ discretion  _ would be good.  Y’know , so I’m not tossed in the madhouse.”

He held up his hands, as if in defense. “No, mate, don’t worry. I hardly say  anythin ’  anyroad . You know me.”

Paul looked down and laughed lightly, but George’s words were sobering. “Well, no, I don’t, really.” His ‘friend’ didn’t have anything to say to that. “I don’t know anyone I meet anymore. I don’t know the people who think they know me.”

“But didn’t you say that your brother and -”

He knew it was rude to interrupt, but it hardly mattered. “They’re not really my family, Geo.  _ My  _ father loves cooking, watches chefs on the television all the time. And he’ll smile at you when you catch his eye, even if he don’t know you, and if he does, he  might even  give you a hug .  But here, all  _ this Paul’s  _ father knows is how to cook scrambled eggs and run through an entire pack of smokes a day, and he’ll apologize if he accidentally bumps you in the hallway . . .” Paul trailed off before his voice could fail him. 

He felt arms around his shoulders and leaned into the embrace. They must’ve looked a sight, two lads obviously upset on the side of the road. Paul fought to stop the tear that threatened to fall down his cheek. 

“ _ I’m  _ the one who should be sorry. You can’t see the lad you were friends with - ‘cause it’s not me. I’m just masquerading around in his body.”

“Shut up, a’right? Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault. You didn’t choose this, but you have to deal with it. You can’t be worried about me when you’ve got yourself to handle.” 

George pulled away and held him at arm’s length. “Don’t feel guilty. Just think, maybe in your future, there’s some poor sod from the sixties  walkin ’ around,  seein ’ people with those  _ phones  _ and flying cars and whatever else they’ve invented, and he’s jus ’  as lost as you.”

Paul chuckled dryly. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

George shrugged. “Can’t blame me for tryin’.” Paul smiled at him. “But I can tell that you’re still the same Paul I know. You’re considerate, and you care for people, really. And you’re a genius on guitar. Jus’ ‘cause you may’ve had different experiences doesn’t mean you’re not the same Paul.”

He can tell George is trying to convince himself of that, too. He smiled sympathetically. 

The point George was trying to make brought up an interesting question that Paul hadn’t bothered to consider before – the psychological question  of nature versus nurture. Was he really the same person as the kid who grew up in the fifties, listening to Elvis on record, and finding a job at a mechanic’s just to make ends meet? Did his life experiences define him, making him so far removed from  _ this  _ Paul that he was incompatible with his life, or was he essentially the same? Was there any difference at all?”

“God, you’re  makin ’ me head spin,” he said. George eyed him oddly.

“Right.” He looked around, not entirely sure what had just gone through Paul’s mind. “Maybe you are mad. But you’re still me mate, and I was serious earlier, when I said I’d help. If you need  anythin ’, just ask, yeah? I can hardly imagine what you’re going through.”

“Thanks.”

~

George hung around until Paul’s shift ended, which he found to be a welcomed distraction from the slow, meandering business. He was pleasantly surprised to find that George was good company, despite the unfortunate circumstances of their meeting, and figured that they would have been friends, regardless of which ‘version’ of Paul he was. 

They walked back to Paul’s place together. He didn’t need to explicitly invite George; the lad simply assumed that he was always a welcome guest, and nothing Paul had done implied otherwise. 

“So, uh, what’s this place like, in the future?”

Paul cringed without meaning to. ‘In the future’ sounded crass, or perhaps vacuously presumptuous, to his ears. Even if he had accepted the reality of the situation (which was, by no means, an established truth), he was not yet ready to hear it. 

He ignored his initial reaction. 

“It’s not all that different,” he said. “Liverpool, that is. It’s got the same old streets and same old buildings. There’s just different people inside ‘em.”

George knew that Paul could have gone into much greater detail about life in the twenty-first century. He was visibly holding back. “You’re not gonna tell me much, are you?”

“No, uh, I don’t think I will.” Paul had the grace to look bashful. 

“What would be so bad about it? What’s the danger?”

He thought a moment. “It’s always been a rule, y’know, in science fiction, that you don’t talk about the future to people of the past. I guess it’s expected that they’ll try to change it, maybe, or stop it.”

George hummed. “Did you ever read Oedipus Rex?” He said it low, as though classical literature was something you didn’t speak of loudly in public. Paul figured it may have had something to do with reputation. 

He knew the name, certainly, but couldn’t place it until he remembered his Psych course in sixth form. The phrase ‘Oedipus Complex’ had particularly branded itself into his memory, along with an incurable apprehension of any psychologists who called themselves Freudian. 

“That’s the guy who killed his dad and married his mum, right?”

George laughed. “Well, yeah. But that wasn’t the point of it – the point of it was that you couldn’t dodge fate. He  _ knew  _ he was  gonna  to kill his dad and marry his mum,  but  in  tryin ’ to avoid it, he  just  made it ‘ appen .”

He though he could see where George was going with this. “So?”

“So, no matter what you tell someone from the past, and no matter what they do about it, certain things are jus’ gonna happen. It’s fate.”

“You really just want me to tell you about the future, don’t you?” George held his hands up, as if in surrender, as if to say,  _ I tried my best _ . Paul shook his head. “I’m sorry, really, but I don’t know how . . .  _ wise  _ it would be. And,  anyroad , I don’t believe in fate.”

“You don’t?”

They rounded a corner that marked the halfway point between the shop and Paul’s house. “Nah. I mean, if we have free will, what’s the point of it if, whatever we choose, the outcome would be the same?” George didn’t respond immediately. “I don’t see how both of them – free will and fate, I mean – can,  y ’ know , exist together. And I personally like the sound of free will better than fate, so I just don’t believe in fate.”

He mulled that one over for several paces. “But,” he began, “there’s a difference between what  _ could _  happen and what  _ did _  happen, yeah? The difference is, what did happen is what was  _ always going to happen _ .  Somethin’ else could’ve but didn’t.  Some things are  gonna  happen to us, whether we choose ‘ em  or not, right?”

“Well, to an extent, I suppose -”

“Like this whole deal with you and being, er, from the future.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially, as though passers-by may hear and become suspicious. “You didn’t choose it, yeah? But here you are, regardless, because of some, I dunno, celestial experiment gone wrong, maybe.”

“But that doesn’t mean that I was born with  _ one  _ destiny,” Paul argued. “There’s no specific place that I’m somehow meant to end up. I mean, come on. If I was supposed to be here, why wasn’t I just born here, to save fate the effort of bring me?”

George didn’t answer immediately.

Even as he spoke it and knew it sounded preposterous, a degree of wonderment struck him. He hadn’t thought of that possibility before. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he was deliberately sent, or brought, back in time by some force or entity to fulfill a purpose. He hadn’t expected any reason or rhyme to this rambling epic. 

Just as he looked to George and took a breath in preparation for his next words, an unfamiliar voice reached his ears. 

“’Ey, McCartney!” 

Turning, Paul saw a lad, about his age, who must have recognized him from across the street. He waved a passing car to a squelching stop as he hurried across the road, grinning. 

“Hey,” Paul said to the unfamiliar man. He’d become quite good at pretending to recognize the people he met. 

“Hey, Ivan,” George said from beside him. Paul sent him the quickest of glances in thanks for saying the stranger’s name.

It clicked in Paul’s brain that this must be Ivan Vaughan, from the journal. He smiled as he tried to remember everything he’d read about Ivan. 

“George,” Ivan said, not quite as amicably as he’d greeted Paul, despite using the given name instead of the last name. 

“What’s goin’ on?” Paul said. 

Ivan shrugged. He had that typical late fifties coif, with his hair gelled back carefully away from his forehead, trimmed above his ears. He struck Paul as the sort who cared a great deal about his appearance – more than most of the ‘friends’ he had, at least. 

“I  spotted you jus’ now, while I’m  on me way to a mate’s  place.  Don’t think you’ve met ‘ im .” 

Paul looked knowingly at George. “Probably not.”

Ivan thought nothing of the exchange. He clapped a hand on Paul’s shoulder, shooting him a winning, toothy grin. “Mate,  anyroad ,  feels like I ‘ aven’t  seen you in  _ ages _ . Where ’ve  you been?”

It was Paul’s turn to shrug. “You know, around.”

The rest of their conversation was quite brief; the exchange of pleasantries could not evolve into anything more, as Ivan soon excused himself. “He’ll get impatient, me mate will, if you’re late. ‘E’s got  _ such a busy schedule, see _ .” 

Paul smiled as if he understood, and as if he cared, but quite honestly, he hadn’t known Ivan long enough – or at all – to care about his very minor problems. “Then I’ll leave you to appease your high-maintenance friend, then.”

He and George, thankfully for his quite  fatigued  mind, did not return to the subject of predestination or fate, and just walked in friendly silence. 

~

The high-maintenance friend, as it turned out, cared little for Ivan’s tardiness. In fact, he’d forgotten that he was expecting company at all, so the knock at his flat’s front door came as a bit or a surprise. 

John set his guitar to lean against the sofa in the small excuse of a living room in the flat that he shared with his class- and bandmate, Stu  Sutcliffe . It was a certifiable mess; two art students in a rock and roll band had more than enough time to trash it, but not nearly enough to clean it up. Empty bottles of beer, packages of cigarettes, and dirty (or possibly clean? One could never tell) laundry lay strewn about place, a true testament to their lifestyle. 

Well, to  _ Stu’s _  lifestyle. For John’s part, he liked to pick up after himself, but  _ only  _ after himself.  H e enjoyed a clean working space, but not enough to neglect his conviction that Stu would either tidy his own shit or live in it, even though that meant John had to live in it, too.

In other words, he was too lazy to clean a mess he didn’t make.

He’d been practicing guitar, obviously, but it was the sort of practice he could only really do without his  flatmate  there to overhear . This was  because  _ John Lennon _  did  no t  _ practice _ _  –  _ or, at least, wasn’t supposed to.  Alone, he could push his abilities beyond his level of confidence without fear of mistakes (meaning that, while he certainly still  _ made  _ mistakes, he no longer feared those mistakes being revealed to the rest of the band, who all seemed to think him impeccable , and who was he to tarnish than vision? ).  It was a matter of pride; though he didn’t place himself on the pedestal, he certainly wouldn’t step down from it.  He could only get better alone. 

At the sound of a knock on the door, John started. It couldn’t be Stu – he was off with some girl and probably wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, at the earliest.  It took him a moment to remember  that he was supposed to be having that Ivan lad over  to talk about some of the other local bands. 

Ivan, a couple years younger than John and Stu and no great musical talent, was their eyes and ears about Liverpool, of a sort. He made up for his lack of natural skill with enthusiasm, following the music scene around the city like a hound. He would mention when there was a good place for a gig and look around the other emerging (a word used loosely) bands and see, more or less, what John’s little group had to compete with. This was all an unofficial relationship, of course, and partially stood as payment for John and Stu letting him crash at their flat and drink their alcohol, but it  was a status quo that n either party was willing to disrupt. 

John wrenched the door open, fixing a disappointed look on his face. “You’re late,” he said shortly by way of greeting, ignoring the fact that he had forgotten that he was even supposed to come by.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ivan griped, the knowledge that it was in jest doing nothing to mitigate his irritation at the overused stunt. “I was held up. Came  ‘ cross me mates, Paul and George, on the way. But I’m ‘ere now, and that counts for somethin’, don’t it?”

John, who wasn’t really irritated and didn’t care for the excuse, simply shrugged  noncommittally  and left his door open for Ivan to close when he entered. He found his place on the sofa once more, set his guitar in his lap and strummed a familiar, well-practiced riff that he couldn’t possibly mess up. “What’s  goin ’ on with you, then?”

Ivan rambled on, saying many words with little meaning, as he helped himself to a bottle that John and Stu had  on their counter . John was partially zoning out whatever he was saying until the younger lad set himself down heavily onto the sofa very close to John and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. 

“What’s the report, soldier?” he asked, nudging Ivan in the side for more elbow room. 

Wiggling a bit so as to give the illusion that he was trying to move, Ivan took a large gulp of beer before replying. “Well, not much’s been ‘ appening , lately. Only thing remotely  interestin ’ is that group, uh, the Hurricanes, I think –”

“Rory Storm?” John vaguely knew the name. 

“Yeah, ‘ im  and his Hurricanes, they’ve got that drummer. Starr, yeah? Well, their past two gigs, they’ve ‘ad somebody else,  sayin ’ he’s sick or somethin’.”

John plucked a simple little tune as he thought. “Hm. That’s almost certainly a leadup to replacement, him being gone  so long .  Good to know we’re not the only ones who can’t find a good one. ”

Ivan hummed. “It could be. Or he could actually be sick. I seem to remember that the kid was pretty dedicated,  y’know ? And bloody good, too.”

Chuckling, John looked at his friend. “Who are you  callin ’ ‘kid’? I bet he’s got years on you, easy.”

“Oh, you know, it’s just  ‘cause  he’s so short.”

“Well, ‘course he looks short, he’s always  sittin ’ down. He’s a bloody drummer!” John elbowed him again, this time purposefully in the ribs, inciting a laugh , even though he had never seen this ‘Starr’ and could not validate any claims related to his height. . 

John returned to his playing, Ivan to his drinking, and the two sat in comfortable quiet for a while. John lost track of what he was strumming and just began alternating between two or three chords, tapping his foot to some soon-to-be-forgotten rhythm, lost in thought.

He was recalling his last gig. It hadn’t been one of their best, since they had a relatively new lad on drums. John and Stu had gone through what seemed to be an entire city of aspiring musicians in the past year or so, hardly finding somebody who could actually stay in tune or keep a beat, let alone sing backup. 

Even Stu wasn’t that good, John had to admit. He stuck around, not because he ever wanted to be a great bassist, but because he and John were such good friends, and Stu knew that the band thing was John’s dream. When John asked him to join and urged him to learn the bass, Stu said it would only be until he found a good replacement. That had been over a year ago. 

Despite that night being rather unimpressive, musically, John was sure he’d remember it for years, if not the rest of his life. 

He simply hadn’t been able to get the thought of that lad out of his head. That  _ Paul _ . John didn’t even need to know his last name to know that it would sound just as perfect for him as his first name did. After he’d left  him  that Sunday afternoon, he hadn’t been able to get him out of his head. Even with t hat  constant reminder, however, he had made no progress on his mission to find out more about the enigmatic character (this was, of course, for lack of trying, because though John cared quite a great deal about discovering at least Paul’s surname, he had no idea where to even start, and that sort of thing usually discouraged any further action). It was infuriating. 

Paul. What sort of last name would go well with  _ Paul _ ? 

“Wait a second,” he suddenly said aloud. “Ivan, who did you say made you late in comin’ here?”

Taken aback by the unexpected question on a topic he’d certainly not thought would be the topic of conversation, Ivan said, “Uh, Paul and George. Why?”

John couldn’t help but grin. “This Paul, does he have black hair, big eyes? Kind of thin?”

“Yeah, that’d be Paul McCartney,” he replied, confused. “Why?”

John looked straight ahead, still grinning.  McCartney.  _ I’ve got you now.  _ Paul McCartney. “Oh, no reason, really,” he excused, trying to sound nonchalant.

“When  d’you  meet him? He's been a mate o’ mine for years. I’ve tried to introduce you,  y’know , for a long time now, but ‘e’s never gone for it,” Ivan rambled, oblivious to John’s victorious expression. 

“Did you, now? Why?”

“Well, I  dunno  what’s always kept him. Guess he jus’ never found the time. But I’ve told you ‘bout him before, haven’t I? Paul that plays the guitar?” John shook his head, knowing very well that Ivan may have done just that, but that John probably hadn’t listened. “He’s younger than you, which is always why you used to brush it off,  too,  but now, there’s just never time, I guess.”

John nodded. “He plays guitar, then?” 

Ivan grinned widely. “God, does  ‘ e. He’s pretty good, you know. Always has been.  But l ike I said, you always used to say my friends were too young to play in your band.”

John waved his hand in dismissal. “No, I didn’t,” he said, knowing full well that he had. “How good is he?”

Ivan said cheekily, “Better than you,” before ducking away and covering his head with his arms, anticipating an outraged strike. John probably would have smacked his head in the brotherly-affection way that inflicted pain but also stood for fondness, had he not been so distracted by sense of achievement.

Paul McCartney. 

John was not exactly sure what his end goal was, but if he knew one thing, it was that he was now one step closer. 

* * *

I do hope the quasi-philosophical discussion was at least mildly interesting, though I'm sure it's secondary compared to whatever John's planning . . . Please let me know how it's going! 


	6. To Frame Thy Fearful Imagery

Upon finally accepting the unfortunate circumstances of his best friend’s consciousness being usurped, more or less, by an unwilling inhabitant from an almost unimaginable future, George showed himself to be insatiably curious.  

During the early hours of day twelve of being in this odd, impossible dream, not twenty-four hours after their meeting at the mechanic’s and reconciliation for any tension this predicament had caused, Paul was awoken from what would have been a restful sleep by the sound of the phone ringing downstairs.  

Longing for the days when mobile phones meant midnight callers could be silenced by barely raising a finger, he trudged down the stairs to the living room. Knowing that his father was too deep in slumber to answer the ringing and his brother was, most likely, stubbornly ignoring the incessant battery left Paul as the only one to answer.  

He hardly stopped to wonder who could possibly have something to say to the McCartneys at this late an hour. He glanced at the clock on the wall for the time – half one – before picking up the receiver and falling back into the large plush chair beside the table. Even if this would be a short phone call, he was simply too tired to stand. 

“McCartney residence,” answered his sleep-muffled voice. 

“Paul!” came an answer far two enthusiastic for the time of night.  

He felt that he should recognize the voice, but he was not yet alert enough. “Er, hello?” 

“It’s George, you daft sod.” 

Paul made a noise somewhat like a sigh, somewhat like a groan, and somewhat like a scoff to communicate his surprise and exasperation. “Geo?” He rubbed his eyes, which he could hardly keep open. “What’s got you callin’ so late? Somethin’ wrong?” 

“I’m real sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, “but I couldn’t get it out of me head. What you said, o’ course.” 

“Uh, mate, you have any idea what time it is?” 

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But I haven’t the faintest idea how you can sleep, knowing you’re,” he paused there, then lowered his voice to a barely-perceptible whisper, “from the future.” 

Yawning, Paul replied, “Well, I  _was_ getting on with it just fine, if you must know.” He heard a vague chuckle from the other side, and an intake of breath, but hurried to mention, “At any rate, you managed well enough this past week, didn’t you?” 

“It only just struck me,” he defended. “I mean, really,  _really_ struck me. I jus’ can’t stop thinking about it. It’s impossible. It’s like something from that H. G. Wells novel, y’know? I can hardly believe it.” 

Sighing, he said, “I understand that you’re, er, having some sort of mental crisis, but I’ve come enough to terms with it to sleep at night. Can’t you?” 

“No, I can fuckin’ not!” he declared. “I just need to talk to you about all of this . . . future business. I’ve got so many questions and I can’t get it out of my head; it’s driving me mad.” 

Laughing dryly, “How do you think I feel all the time now? Look, I get that you’re confused, but it’s just too late for me to think straight on a normal day, let alone right now. Can you, please, just go to sleep? You can come over tomorrow, if you really want.” 

“How am I supposed to sleep until then?” 

“Fuck, I dunno. Try meditation. Listen to some Brahms. Count your toes. Anything but keepin’ me awake all night.” 

Evidently not pleased but powerless to make Paul comply, George simply sighed exasperatedly. “Fine. But I’ll be there the second you get off work.” 

“Sure. G’night.” 

Once he heard the click of the receiver on George’s end, Paul let his wrist fall slack, his own receiver resting lazily against his cheek. He chuckled lazily to himself, his eyes still closing shut from sleepiness, as it struck him how comic George’s enthusiasm was. George, who was so calm and collected, so grounded and assured in his ways, had just realized his own little window of immortality in Paul.  

~ 

The rather rudely-timed phone call was a prelude to an even more emphatic attempt on George’s part to glean, from Paul, some semblance of what the future will be like.  

He was tired, the following evening, not from a long, hard day’s work, but from a long, boring day’s sitting around and  _waiting_  for work. The days seemed to grow impossibly hotter, as shown by the trail of sweat that ran down the side of his face from his hair, making the walk home from the shop the only  _physically_ strenuous – or even mildly demanding – part of his day. That is, if one did not count how physically difficult it was to  _sit still_  for so long.  

Walking home at a brisk but comfortable pace, eager to get out of the heat, Paul hardly heard the voice calling his name. “Ey, Paul, wait up!” 

He stopped, turning. Quite a few paces behind him he saw the now almost-familiar figure of Ivan Vaughan. 

Paul was only a few roads away from his own street; he wished that Ivan would have waited until he was home and called upon his house. He was walking towards him with a purpose, meaning that he had purposefully sought Paul out – he obviously knew his rout home from work, so he certainly knew where that home was, and was calling upon it for some particular business. Paul, for his part, mostly just wanted to be in the cool of his own home.  

He waved and walked towards Ivan, eager to hasten whatever business he had with him. He could almost feel the sun burning his nose – a ridiculous notion, as he could hardly ever get sunburnt in Liverpool, but the feeling was there.  

“Hey, Ivan,” he said, trying not to make his voice sound as weary as he was.  

“Lookin’ a bit tired there, McCartney. Hard day fixin’ all those cars?” he teased. Paul rolled his eyes; he would never be trusted near any of the patrons’ automobiles, and he was sure everyone who knew him knew that, as well.  

He scoffed. “The sheer boredom of that job makes me wish it were.” 

Ivan shrugged in a ‘what can you do’ manner. “It’s money. At leas’ you could find a job, which is better than me.” 

“I guess so,” Paul said nonchalantly, not really knowing how difficult it had been to secure the job, since  _he_  hadn’t exactly done it,  

“Anyroad,” he continued, shuffling around in his pocket for a moment before pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. “Want a smoke?” he offered the pack to Paul, who refused. Ivan tilted his head to the side, as if to say, ‘why not?’ but shrugged. “Anyroad, I came to ask you, what time d’you get off on Fridays?” 

Paul thought a moment, to make sure he wasn’t thinking of the time the record shop closed, and said, “Six. Why?” 

He let out a puff of smoke, which Paul tried not to wrinkle his nose at, and answered, “You should come ‘round to the Cavern for drinks. Me and some of those other lads’ll be there. You’ll be free?” 

Paul didn’t immediately register the name of the place he’d said. “Er, I might be.” 

“Great. So you’ll come?” 

“I never said that,” Paul refuted. “If I do, I’m bringin’ Geo, a’right?” 

Ivan shrugged. “Yeah, sure.” 

They were prepared to part, then, and Paul was more than eager to get away from the smoke and out of the sun, when something occurred to him. “Wait. Why do you want me to go? You said it was the  _Cavern_? What’s happening there?” he spouted out question after question. Though it was just a name, ‘the Cavern’ left a bitter, foreboding taste in his mouth.  

He eyed Paul, as if trying to figure out his ulterior motive, which was, coincidentally, just what Paul himself was trying to do. “Jus’ me and a few mates, goin’ for a drink. What’s the matter with you? You won’t smoke, and now you’re tellin’ me you won’t drink, neither?” 

Paul raised his hands. “No, no, that's not it,” he refuted. “I just wanted to make sure that . . . well, we’re not goin’ there for, uh, the music gigs, are we?” 

There was something in Ivan’s face, then, something in the raise of his eyebrow and the ever so slight twitch of his lips that suggested to Paul that ‘goin’ for a drink’ was not all they would be there for. However, simply because Paul didn’t  _want_ that to be the reason for the invitation, no matter how ominous the parting warning from Lennon had been, he told himself he was being paranoid;,imagining things. It's quite outstanding how easily he can convince himself of something and believe it to be true.  

“No, no,” Ivan said. “I don’t even know who’s playin’ there that night. Do you know somethin’ about it?” Paul didn’t know him well enough to tell if he was lying.  

“Nothing,” he said. “Just wondering.” 

“Well, wonder all you want on your way to the Cavern,” he said. “Friday night, nine, okay?” 

“Sure,” he said, and they went their separate ways.  

Paul continued his walk home.  

Sighing as he unlocked the front door, Paul noticed by the quiet and lack of a car in the drive that nobody was home; his father was at work, and Mike was undoubtedly out galivanting with friends. He set his wallet and keys down on the counter and got a hasty cup of water from the sink, wincing at the strong taste of city chlorine but relaxing at the cool sensation running down his throat.  

He was leaning against the counter, one hand holding the cup, the other braced against the refrigerator, so that no part of his body was touching any other, if it could be avoided, so he could cool off as quickly as possible. Content to remain like this for the foreseeable future, he was mildly surprised to hear a sharp knock on the door.  

It took him a moment to recall the conversation in the middle of last night with George, but once he did, he shook his head good-naturedly and moved to the door.  

He opened it. “Hey,” he greeted the widely smiling face that greeted him.  

“You don’t know how long this day has been,” was George’s salutation as he brushed past Paul and entered the house without formal invitation. “I’ve been waiting  _forever_. I’ve so much to ask you; I made a list.” 

Paul let out what could only be the dihybrid cross of a cough, laugh, and scoff as George produced a slip of paper covered almost entirely with small scribbles. “Jesus, mate, don’t you have anythin’ better to do?” 

George looked around, dramatically suspicious, and put a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he stage-whispered. “The boss doesn’t know I’m gone early.” 

He shook his head. “All right, then, you over-eager dog. Want some water or somethin’?” 

At George’s shrug, Paul filled his own cup once more, and got another, either for George, if he wanted it, or for him, if he was still thirsty later. He couldn’t remember the last time a walk home from work was this exhausting. The two made their way upstairs.  

Paul could tell, once they were in his room, that he was about to launch head-first into his list of questions. Interrupting what hadn’t yet been said, he put in, “You know that there’s stuff I just  _can’t_  tell you, right?” 

George huffed. “Yeah, yeah, you said that, earlier,” he sat upon the bed, bouncing slightly in excitement. “But I’ve  _got_  to ask. I mean, if you can’t tell me, at least I know the answer’s important, then, won’t I?” 

He had reservations. For one, he wasn’t that good a liar; the main reason he hated lying was because it was  _so difficult_ , and he was always caught for it. Only ancillary was the fact that lying was morally wrong.  

If he lied, George would probably know. Any version of Paul from any time was bound to be terrible at lying.  

Secondly, he wasn’t sure if he knew what he should and shouldn’t say. He didn’t trust himself to think through, logically, each answer he gave, to estimate its possible repercussions.  

“All right. Shoot.” 

George adjusted his position on the bed, holding the slip of paper in front of him, as though he couldn’t remember each thing he wrote down, but Paul was sure he could. “First and foremost, I guess, and the one that you probably can’t answer – Do you know me?” 

Paul paused a bit too long before saying “No.” 

“Do you know  _of_ me?” 

Now was the test of Paul’s duplicitous skills. “No.” He didn’t know whether he should look at George or not; was averting his eyes suspicious, or would it be weird to stare? He settled with looking lazily at George’s nose as he spoke.  

George expertly avoided looking relieved or disappointed; perhaps the Paul he knew would have been able to tell, but the Paul that was couldn’t.  

“Okay.” He looked at the paper, finding the next question he wanted to ask. “Uh, has there been another world war?” 

Was there any harm in being honest? “There hasn’t been another world war, no.” 

This seemed to please George. Paul wasn’t sure if that was because he got the answer he wanted or he got an answer at all.  

“Have there been  _any_ wars?” 

“Oh, certainly.” That was sort of unavoidable, wasn’t it? People and war just went together like wasps and stinging. He left it at that, though, and didn’t go into any of the specifics without prompting – even with prompting, he wasn’t sure he would.  

“Can you tell me about them?” 

He didn’t want to tell anybody anything important, in case they would try to change the course of history. He didn’t know, though, if George even had the power to do anything with any information Paul may give him.  

Should he tell him about nuclear armament and the resolution of the Cold War, about Vietnam, about Middle East? Those  _could_  be world wars, from George’s perspective, just because they involved countries from around the world, even if it wasn’t from every continent. He didn’t want to scare him into any sort of ‘the end is neigh’ mindset and cause panic.  

“Uh, I really don’t think I can.” 

Though visibly disappointed by the answer, George pressed on. “Does anybody drop a bomb?” 

Paul ignored the multitude of jokes that ran through his brain and  _tried_  to ignore the Pink Floyd tune that wormed its way into his brain and simply would not leave:  _Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?_  

“Again, I can’t really say.” 

George grumbled a half-hearted, “ _Killjoy_ ,” and moved on. “Are there any really big, uh, natural disasters, or  _un_ natural disasters?” 

“Well, there’s hurricanes, certainly. And tornadoes. And earthquakes. They happen all the time.” He ignored the  _un_ natural disasters that had most certainly happened – the oil spills, the nuclear meltdowns, and the like. Those are things he was sure George could do without knowing.  

“But not, like, the sun became black, and the moon became blood, right?”  

He laughed. “No, Geo, it’s not the coming of the Apocalypse. At least, it wasn’t when I left.” 

“Just makin’ sure,” he shrugged. “What about music? I guess that’s what I really care about. Does it get better? Worse?” 

Paul wrinkled his nose. “Both,” he said. “But y’know, it’s hard to say. Different tastes, right?” 

George shook his head. “No, Paul. You’ve got good taste and I trust you enough to know good music from bad. So tell me, is it uphill or downhill?” 

Paul considered. “Well, the way  _I_ see it,” he raised his hand and drew a hill in the air. “We’re about,  er , here, I’d say. Almost to the middle of the incline, right now.” He used his other hand to point. “I’d say that the  _best_ music will be in the next couple of decades. So, listen loud and go deaf by the time it goes downhill, yeah?” 

He laughed. “Sure, I will.” 

George ran through the rest of his list. For most of the questions, if Paul even answered them, he was reluctant, and held back quite a bit. He felt like his stern old chemistry teacher who would always answer part of a student’s question and tell them to ‘figure the rest out by yourself’, but that’s essentially what he had to do.  

There weren’t many questions about politics, either because knew Paul wouldn’t answer them or he simply care, but fo the few that were asked, he didn’t supply an answer, other than to say, “No, England has not been overthrown. It’s still here.” Furthermore, he avoided any mention of Ebola or AIDS when George asked about diseases, and refrained from getting too specific when the subject of technology came up, mostly because he didn’t  _know_ how to answer it.  

“But how does it  _work_? Can I see it again?” 

Paul had only ever seen children that excited over a mobile phone. “I want to conserve the battery, so it’s off,” he said as an apology. “But otherwise, I'd let you see it, at least.” 

He furrowed his brows. “So you change the batteries?” 

“It’s rechargeable.” 

He said ‘huh’, as though that explained things, but Paul knew it didn’t.  

“Honestly, I don’t know much about how it works. I know there’s circuits and stuff. Electricity. But I’m no engineer.” He didn’t want to go any farther into it, because the use of phones would undoubtedly bring about the subject of the Internet, which was a puddle he  _really_  didn’t want to wade through.  

“Jus’ one more  _very_  important question,” George said, many questions and partial explanations later. He leaned forward, taking furtive glances around, as though he were being watched. “Are there . . . aliens?” 

Paul barely refrained from whistling a certain tune. He laughed instead, saying, “Not that I know of, but there will be some  _really excellent_ shows about it on television in the coming years.” He left it up to George to figure out whether that was sarcasm or not.  

“At least somethin’ to look forward to, then.” 

~ 

Later that evening, after Paul informed him of the plans to go to the Cavern on Friday, George left. Paul had insisted on him coming along for quite a few reasons – first and foremost, the most practical reason of all: he was fully (or, very nearly fully) aware of Paul’s predicament, and could act as a buffer if any tense situations arose concerning who Paul did or did not know and what Paul had or had not done. He was operating under the assumption that George knew everything about his friend’s social life, but the Paul that Was having some clandestine life was a possibility the Paul that Is didn’t want to consider.  

Paul would be drinking with a group of lads he didn’t know. That presented two more problems, the negative effects of which he hoped George’s presence could mitigate. The drinking, first of all, wasn’t ideal, because Paul seldom drank socially, because the more people he was around, the more he tended to drink. He didn’t necessarily want to be drunk in 1961, surrounded by (more or less) complete strangers. If he did, however, he was relying upon George to keep him in line.  

That lead to the third problem: he would have no idea who most of the people were, other than Ivan. Had he not said that they would meet some ‘mates’? The only of his ‘friends’ Paul had yet had the fortune to meet were George and Ivan, though there were undoubtedly more, and he would probably feel quite the fish out of water.  

The fourth reason was simply that Paul enjoyed George’s company.  

He had been able to sense that Ivan wasn’t quite pleased by the fact that George was tagging along. He attributed this to George’s age, because there was nothing else that Ivan could possibly find issue with; George was funny, intelligent, and musically gifted, and Paul knew some guys didn’t like hanging around with people even one year younger than them out of some understood stigma surrounding juniors. Ivan may just be too proud to deign to grace George with his friendship.  

Paul didn’t think he liked Ivan much, just from the two encounters he’d had.  

There was also the fact that he half expected Ivan to be conspiring against him in relation to John Lennon. Only half, because although he acted somewhat suspicious when Paul questioned him about the band playing, there was really no reason Paul could find for Ivan to want him to run into John Lennon in the first place. It was most likely a manifestation of Paul’s own suspicions and anxieties, and he had nothing at all to fear.  

But he did fear it, even if irrationally. It wasn’t that he disliked John Lennon – he hardly knew him. Yes, he seemed pushy and overbearing, but on the right person, those aren’t bad characteristics, necessarily.  

The issue with John was that he was dangerous. Or, rather, Paul interacting with him was dangerous. Of course, Paul interacting with George was also dangerous, too, but he liked to think that it was slightly less so, since the Paul that belonged here had known George already. The list possible ways he could change the course of those Silver Beatles’ history was shorter if he interacted with George, rather than Lennon.  

The real danger, he knew, would be if his suspicions weren’t unfounded; if John and his band really were there. He wasn’t sure, yet, if they knew each other already, but he knew that catalyzing their meeting could only result in drastic and egregious change. He resolved to leave immediately and drag George along with him, were that the case.  

Setting his mind back to the issues at hand rather than his worries over Friday, Paul set about preparing supper for his father and Mike. That was one thing his own life had in common with this new one: he had, more or less, taken over many of the household duties his mother had previously performed, including cooking and the laundry. It was terribly domestic, and wasn’t the type of work Paul enjoyed (as if he enjoyed any type of work), but it had to be done, and his father was too busy, while Mike was too stubbornly inept.  

After eating a tense dinner (all dinners, now, felt this way, since they were ‘family’ dinners, but for Paul, without the family), he showered and prepared for bed, having nothing better to do than sleep. He found that, without the luxury of endless entertainment from his phone or laptop, he was rather bored most of the time; the three channels on the television never played anything worthwhile, and he didn’t feel comfortable playing music from the record player, because his father and Mike would certainly hear. He didn’t want to be a bother to a family that wasn’t his.  

It was also rather exhausting, every day, to conduct himself according to the preestablished rules of somebody else’s life. He had figured that, while in Rome, he should do as he Romans do; but it was an all-consuming task, paying constant attention to his every action, to make sure it was not out of line.  

Despite the appeal of blissful rest, Paul was disgruntled to find that it would not come. He’d tried all the tricks his mother ever told him when he could not sleep: he imagined his body falling asleep, from his toes to his head, but that just made him want to kick his feet; he counted as high as he could, until he simply lost track, and became frustrated. He tossed and turned, flipped his pillow, and even forced himself to yawn – nothing worked.  

It was a common thing, now, the insomnia. He couldn’t always shut off his mind at night, since this ordeal began. Tonight, however, he didn’t have the usual thoughts of preparing a face to meet the people that he meets; he had one particular face on his mind.  

The face of John Lennon.  

He told himself that John was not handsome. In a sense, he was right; there were parts of his face that were too angular and too harsh to be handsome, conventionally. But in another sense, he couldn’t be more wrong. There was just something that John did. A way he held himself, a way he adopted expressions, a way he looked at Paul, that struck him as not only handsome, but beautiful.  

He tried to shake his head, as if it would shake the thoughts from his mind. It did not work.  

The impractically foolish part of him hoped, if only barely, that he  _would_  find John at the Cavern on Friday. He wanted to see that wry smirk and hear that strained, spellbinding voice as he sang. He wanted John to simply look at him in the way that went past his eyes and into the very fibers of his being.  

These thoughts startled him. No – they  _jarred_ him. Not only were they surprising; they were unpleasant. He couldn’t have a . . . a  _crush_ on John Lennon.  

It wasn’t that John was another man. Well, it wasn’t  _not_ that, either – it's just that Paul had never really fancied a lad before. He wasn’t even sure that what he felt  _was_ a fancy; maybe it was just an interest in something so unfamiliar that it confused him.  

He wasn’t gay, but he wasn’t necessarily straight, either. He didn’t know what he was, had never thought about it much. He’d had a girlfriend, back in sixth form, when that was just the thing to do; he’d broken up with her after a few months, and neither of them much cared one way or the other.  

Of course, he’d pass people in the street and think,  _oh, he’s quite handsome_ , or  _she’s quite beautiful_ , but it was in the same objective way that he’d pass the Statue of David and think, o _h, that marble is quite smooth_. He wasn’t really attracted to anybody in particular – not until John.  

No, it’s not the sexual orientation that unnerved him about his unprecedented attraction to John; it was the man himself.  

John Lennon, forgotten to history, save for a dusty record and a Wikipedia article last edited over three years ago.  

John Lennon, happily living his rightful life in his rightful time.  

John Lennon, dead decades before Paul was even born. 

He didn’t need Paul to mess with the life he wanted to lead. Paul didn’t have the right and shouldn’t have had the opportunity.  

These thoughts lead, eventually, to a fitful sleep with night terrors that left only a vague notion of foreboding each time they woke him.  

~ 

Friday came both too soon and not soon enough. 

It was an occasion that he both looked forward to and dreaded because he wasn’t sure what to expect. It wasn’t the sort of thing he  _should_ dread, since a drink with friends, in and of itself, is a rather nice convention. Paul was simply unable to relax enough to forget his incessant misgivings at admittedly remote possibilities.  

Regardless of his feelings about the meeting, he encouraged himself to wash up and dress with the knowledge that it would happen, for better or for worse. He had agreed to this outing; he could not retract the promise now.  

By the time he met George in front of the bus stop that stood as a close enough centroid between their two houses and the Cavern, his palms were clammy. He smiled and hoped it didn’t look as nervous as he felt.  

“You’re gonna buy me a drink, right?” George asked as they adopted a comfortably brisk pace.  

Paul put a hand over his heart. “Goodness, no! I’m simply shocked, Georgie, that you’d even  _consider_  underage drinking.” His false outrage was perhaps more obnoxious than it would usually be thanks to his nerves, which exaggerated every action he took; he was walking faster than usual, swinging his arms with slightly more force, and taking breathes a bit too sharply. 

“Why else did I bring you? Useless,” George grinned at him.  

As it turned out, he did buy George a drink. When they puhed through the Cavern’s doors a quarter of an hour later, Paul scanned the crowd and was not exactly surprised to find the same bartender pouring drinks. He approached to buy the cheapest beer he could for himself and George.  

“’Ey, you again, lad?” he asked, not unkindly, but not welcomingly, either.  

“Me again,” he grin-grimaced. He held out his ID – the one that actually meant something here – to avoid any further conversation and hasten the purchase. The memory of that first night made Paul feel uncomfortably lost and homesick, feelings he’d tried so desperately to ignore. Sparing him one more glance, the bartender gave him the requested two beers and let him on his way.  

He turned, pints in hand, to find George in conversation with Ivan at a nearby table. He went to them.  

“Paul!” Ivan exclaimed, opening his arms to clap his shoulders. His wide smile and cheerful eyes told Paul that he was either very glad, indeed, to see him, or he’d been there long enough for a few drinks already, making everything new was exciting. “You finally  _graced us with your presence_.” 

Paul wasn’t in the mind to discern whether that comment was playful or snide, so he simply ignored it. He nodded to Ivan, glanced almost involuntarily at George, and surveyed the rest of the lads gathered around the table.  

He recognized  _none_  of them.  

There were three others, in total, which made for more than a crowd around the small round table. Looking like the quintessential teenage rebel he’d come to recognize as the crowd ‘he’ hung out with, they surrounded Ivan and George like flies to honey.  

One of them looked at Paul. “Haven’t seen you ‘round in a while,” he said.  

“Been busy,” Paul shrugged. He found that he had given that excuse frequently these past fourteen days.  

He heard a short ring of feedback from a microphone system, followed by some commotion and the rise of a voice from the stage. Then, the environment of the room shifted dramatically.  

Perhaps that lad was asking, ‘With what?’, or perhaps Ivan was saying something inconsequential about the beer, or perhaps George was trying to catch his eye for one reason or another. Perhaps the world did not simply cease to revolve around the sun and begin to revolve around the stage, several yards to Paul’s left.  

Perhaps any number of these things happened, but Paul was not to know.  

All he could hear was the voice speaking loudly from that aforementioned stage, loudly cutting through the crowd with the cheap microphone.  

“G’evenin’, ladies and gents! Tonight, we bring to you the one, the only,  _Silver Beetles_!” 

Paul’s head turned to the stage faster than his neck could accommodate it; he found himself unable to look away.  

* * *

All right, this one's a bit filler-y, but I realized, hey, I've introduced George to a guy from the future, and he's hardly been mildly curious! It's time he asked those important questions. And the next chapter's gonna have quite a bit of action; stay tuned!  


A note about the next update, though: You'll notice I'm posting a day early, because starting tomorrow, I'm going to be travelling for two wee. That means I'll have no time to write/update the next chapter, which is already written. But, since I'm always one chapter ahead with writing (for insurance purposes, of a sort), I'll probably need a week back to catch up, so you'll be seeing me again in about three weeks, I think. I do apologize for leaving you all here, but please keep an eye out for updates! 

 


	7. Dirges in the Dark

There he was, standing in all his casual glory, appraising the audience as though onstage with a guitar in his arms was the most comfortabl y natural  place in the world  for him .  It probably was.  His  well-worn  button-up shirt was too loose on him, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the top three buttons open, exposing the pale shine of his sweating skin. His hair curled back from his face  in lazy perfection , undoubtedly aided by gel. Exuding confidence, John Lennon narrowed his eyes to observe the crowd that was there, in his mind, solely for him .  He did not merely hold the microphone between his hands as he stood in front of his less remarkable bandmates; he held the audience in his palm. 

He  cast his eyes down to  the guitar slung over his shoulder for a moment, finding his fingering, and paused long enough to say, “To begin our show tonight is Eddie Cochran, ‘C’mon Everybody’!”

Paul didn’t know the song, himself, but that hardly mattered. 

Strumming the opening chords, John scanned the audience once more before finding Paul’s gaze. The expression that overcame the singer’s face, then, was an ambiguous  mix  of curiosity and self-satisfaction, but not quite surprise. Paul froze, enraptured by those eyes, that smile,  the  voice – the music, horrid as the bassist and lagging as the drummer were, couldn’t detract from the unrefined power of that voice. Paul couldn’t even blink until John looked down to find his place again. 

He took that opportunity to look away, to escape from that  barred prison of a gaze . He sent an almost pleading glance to George, as if hoping it would somehow help him, before remembering that his friend wasn’t privy to this particular bit of the story. 

Then, he shifted his eyes to Ivan, and the look wasn’t nearly as kind. “Ivan,” he said, almost as a warning, though the action against which he was warning had already been taken; it was  simply  a desperate and attempt to reverse what he had feared would happen.

“What?” Ivan said innocently.  _ Too _  innocently. The lad couldn’t stop the sideways smirk that took over his lips and couldn’t  quite  keep his eyes on Paul; the y  shift ed  almost guiltily,  almost mischievously , to the stage, told him all he needed to know. 

His suspicions weren’t unfounded. Ivan had been up to something. He  _ knew _  something. 

Or , at least,  some _ one _ . 

What did Ivan know of his meetings with John? What would be the motive for this arrangement? Paul suddenly got the notion that Ivan was a spy, infiltrating his life to do John Lennon’s dirty work. 

He hadn’t forgotten John’s parting words to him, as much as he’d tried. He’d sworn to uncover the secret he was convinced Paul was hiding –  though  that would not have worried him so much if he weren’t, in fact, hiding something. As it was, Paul had a great deal to lose. 

He should assume, then, that Ivan knew only as much as John did – which was, hopefully,  very  little. He didn’t say anything to Ivan, for fear of revealing something he might not already know. He simply fixed him with a scathing, disappointed glare, before shaking his head and taking a deep sip of beer. 

The rest of the Cavern hummed with chatter and commotion, it was brought alive by the alcohol and made vibrant by the music. It bled through the temperaments of George, Ivan, and Ivan’s friends, who were raucous and jubilant, oblivious to his inner turmoil. Paul tried his best not to listen to the talk of his tablemates, because when he did so,  th e ir unfamiliar subjects rendered him so  terribly confused, but it was rather difficult, as he was also trying not to focus on Lennon’s energetic and pervasive singing. 

Every so often, he would look from George to John, as if doing so would reveal whether there was any familiarity between the two. To his disappointment, he never once saw George  glance  towards the stage; if he had, Paul could have assumed that George was at least acquainted with John. He had hoped for some respite from the constant anxiety that he  w ould possibly encourage the meeting between George and John prematurely, but had no such luck. 

“Come on, McCartney,” Ivan said,  pulling him from his thoughts and  shoving the beer clasped between  his  hands closer to his chest, so that the liquid sloshed over the rim and spilled onto his sleeves. “You’re bein’ so fuckin’ depressing. Jus’ have some fun.”

He shook out his sleeves, rather unimpressed, so far, with what he’d seen from Ivan. “Maybe I could, if you didn’t spill my beer, you wanker,” he grumbled. 

George sent him a sidelong glance. For his part, he could  partially  understand why Paul wasn’t exactly exhilarated to be here, but the extent of his irritable displeasure was a bit perplexing. He said nothing, though, because Ivan did it for him. 

“What’s  twistin ’ your knickers lately, mate?” he demanded. “You’ve been  pissy  for days .  I noticed. What is it, then?”

Perhaps he had been rather  uncharacteristically  short with Ivan. After all, Ivan knew nothing of Paul’s personal struggles, presumably; he couldn’t understand the gravity of his situation. Maybe he was being unreasonable. 

“Sorry,” he said, trying to sound as genuine as possible. “I’ve jus’ been, uh, pretty busy lately. Haven’t gotten much sleep.”

Ivan reached across the table to nudge his shoulder with his fist. “Then you  _ need  _ this,” he insisted. “Loosen up. It’s not like you to be so . . . bland.”

_ Gee, thanks _ . 

He wasn’t exactly up to being the life of the party, but he didn’t want  anyone to press t he issue  any  further, so instead of fixing his mug with a steely stare, he settled for idly scanning the rest of the pub –  _ not  _ the stage – with as content a look on his face as he could muster. 

So consumed was he with simply watching the other patrons  and  fabricating their life stories based solely upon their apparel and conduct at one particular moment in time that he failed to notice the band announce the end of its set and the beginning of another. That was good, in part, because it meant he succeeded in tuning out the performance, but bad because he noticed too late a figure sauntering confidently into his periphery, jarring him rudely from his reverie. 

He had entertained the retrospectively fantastic notion that John would simply ignore him after they broke off the tense eye contact from the beginning of his performance , that h e would just forget that Paul was here and let him go on with his night in relative piece. 

He knew, though, that some dreams were impossible. Another human presence to his left told him that John was there, settling himself close to Paul as if he w ere  welcome, as if he belonged. 

“So,  _ Paul _ ,” Lennon drawled, clasping a firm hand on his shoulder and leaning close to their table. Paul tried not to jump at the contact, he really did. “Or, rather, McCartney, I should say. I’m finally on last-name basis with you.  Ain’t  it nice?”

The hand on his shoulder felt too hot  and  made the area that  it  wasn’t touching too cold. Paul minutely rolled his shoulder back as an intimation that John should release him, but he only adjusted his grip slightly. It made a blush r ise treacherously  up Paul’s neck, which he hoped would go unnoticed. 

“I’ve Ivan to thank, really. Our mutual pal was kind enough to mention you,” he continued, at which Ivan shrugged. “He said your name, and I thought,  _ hmm, that sounds quite like  _ my  _ Paul. _  And it was true  – not  too many  Pauls  ‘round these parts,  d’you  think, with eyes like yours, are there?”

The blush crept up to his cheeks. The comment made him feel quite conscious of where his gaze fell, and whose fell on him, which was rather unfortunate, as he couldn’t look away from John. He opened his mouth to say something (he wasn’t sure what) when he was saved from looking like a gulping fish by Ivan’s derisive laugh. “Stop  lyin ’ with that queer shit, Lennon. You’ve scared ‘ im  enough; don’t need to chase ‘ im  off already.”

John rolled his eyes. “Oh, shut it, kid.” He didn’t deny that his antics were ‘queer’, though, which Paul attributed to some  common  understanding that, of course, they  _ couldn’t  _ be. 

A few more squabbling remarks passed between John and Ivan as Paul glanced at George. 

He’d looked over to watch the interaction with a bit of an odd look on his face. Most likely, Paul reckoned, he was wondering exactly what had just happened. Paul hadn’t told him about John at all, he realized, so this was as unusual to George as it had been to him that first night. 

But the sight of George brought another of his worries to the forefront of his mind. Now, without a doubt, John and George would meet. If they were not already  acquainted , he had not wanted to be the one who brought such a moment to its crisis – he wasn’t  _ supposed  _ to. He had no place for it. 

Here they were, however, in the same pub, leaning over the same table, looking at the same person – Paul – who happened, as well, to be the only thing separating them from one another. He leaned forward, as though that could somehow stop them from  finally coming together . 

“All right, then,” Paul said, trying to sound casual, to an arguable degree of success. “You know my name. Congratulations.  D’you  want a medal?”

“’Ave you got one, then?” He propped himself up on his elbow, finally releasing Paul’s shoulder for a hand on which to rest his chin. “I’m honored, really, I am.”

John swung a chair around from a nearby table, sitting in it backwards, resting his forearms against the back. “Was it hard getting ‘ im  here, Ivan? I’d imagine he’d only come  kickin ’ and  screamin ’, what with how he’s tryin’ t’ avoid me like the plague.”

Paul let out a short, harsh laugh. “He lied, the worm,” trying to spare Ivan a teasingly fond glance. He wasn’t sure how it came across. 

“Oh, you were coerced? How simply  _ dreadful _ !” 

He rolled his eyes. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I’m always here,” he said  with a shrug of his shoulders, as though the statement prompted no explanation . “You get used to it. Would you not’ve come, then, if you’d known?” 

His expression was so flippantly confident that Paul must have imagined the hint of vulnerability in his tone. 

“What do you think?” he asked, only to avoid giving an answer he wasn’t sure of himself.  He hated when others responded to a question of his with one of their own, but he rationalized that these were extenuating circumstances that allowed for a bit of  hypocrisy . 

“Do you really want to know?”

He was about to say ‘yes’, but thought better of it. In the second it took him to retract that and formulate ‘no’, however, a nother more distant  voice called, “Hey, Lennon,  you  lazy  arse , we’ve  gotta  get all our shit together! I’m not takin’ your guitar back for yo u  this time!”

Like a petulant child instructed by his parents to perform a particularly onerous chore, John  rolled his eyes and  sighed heavily. “Hold on, will you?” he called to the man, waving him on. 

Paul watched the man leave. He was tallish, with light brown hair and dark, pensive eyes. He carried a bass guitar uncomfortably, unnaturally, as though it were a particularly sharp and heavy blade instead of an instrument. He shrugged in defeat at John before disappearing into what Paul could only assume was the backstage area. 

John shook his head looked back at Paul. “Ridiculous, isn’t ’e? Just ‘spects me to come at his beck an’ call, the bugger.”

“And won’t you?” Paul replied almost involuntarily. He  _ had  _ been trying to convince John that conversation with him wasn’t the best choice, but his natural instinct to respond  sabotaged  those attempts. 

“Nah,  pro’bly  will.”

Paul repressed a snort. He wondered vaguely who this character was (other than the bassist, obviously). He and John seemed rather close. 

“You  gotta  let us backstage with you, John,” Ivan implored. Paul almost cringed at the request and hoped quite dearly that he would refuse. 

“ Ain’t  much of a backstage, though, is it?” John mused. “Just half a room, really.”

“But you’re such a famous band now,” he simpered. 

John  rolled his eyes and  leaned close to Paul , whispering  quite loudly, “He’s like a naggin’ little brother. Won’t shut up ‘til you agree.”

He cursed himself as he agreed, fondly remembering Mike .  “Make life hell, don’t they?”

Being around John seemed to rob Paul of all of his reservations – funny, since those reservations were to being around John in the first place. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to gather his bearings. 

George nudged him gently. He sent him a curious, worried glance, silently asking,  _ You all right?  _ Paul simply pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, which he hoped got across that he was really,  _ really _  trying to be. 

“Oh, come on, you lot,” John acquiesced to Ivan’s request. “Jus’ don’t be surprised if you get that nasty look from Stu. You know how  he tires  of people.”

At the moment, Paul could empathize with the sentiment. 

Ivan stood quickly, eager to follow John back to the makeshift backstage. He glanced at George, who just shrugged as he, too, pushed himself up, and grabbed Paul’s elbow. 

“Come on,” he urged calmly. “Maybe you should get away from the crowd, anyway.”

Quiet, serene George, who was the farthest cry from social creature that he knew, had seemed so oddly comfortable in the crowded pub. It struck Paul as remarkably . . . amphibious of him that he would so easily retire to a quiet backstage (at least, he assumed it would be quiet) and be just as happy. He wished he had George’s level of self-security. 

He followed George, Ivan, and John , albeit reluctantly,  through the crowd of people across the room. He hardly noticed how the other three, whose names he still had not learned, shared a glance, and decided to remain out, getting drunk on the beer and rampant energy in the room. 

~   
‘Backstage’ was just as John had described it. The stage hadn’t been a real stage, after all; it was only a section of the floor separated from the rest by a two-foot rise and a lack of chairs and tables. Therefore, ‘backstage’ was more of an adjacent storage room, not even really behind the ‘stage’ at all. Half of the room was taken up by chairs and tables turned on their sides for storage and shelves of spare mugs and plates, leaving the band, Ivan, George, and Paul to gather in relatively close quarters. 

A few of the benches that sat upside-down on top of the longer tables were taken down. On them were placed Stu and John’s guitars. Stu sat beside his, legs crossed in front of him, examining his fingernails idly, while the third and unnamed band member, who must have been the drummer, was slowly twirling his drumsticks as he leaned against the wall. 

As they entered, George asked Paul quietly, “So, how  d’you  know him, then?” tilting his head in John’s direction. 

Paul sighed. “That first night,” he explained lowly, “when I went back to work, and it wasn’t the record shop anymore -” he looked around, ensuring that nobody could overhear, satisfied that John was in conversation with Stu, and Ivan trailed him like a faithful dog, “-Well, I went in, and ran into John. That was before I realized, uh, you know . . .”

“Yeah,” he nodded  in understanding . “What ‘appened?”

“Well, rather ungracefully, I more or less . . . had a bit of a breakdown.”

George was quizzical. “John made you realize what’d happened?”

Paul shook his head. “No, it’s just that I rec - ” 

He stopped short. He hadn’t told George about John at  _ all _ , including the fact that he recognized his name from the single record he’d made. George didn’t know about it because he’d been the one to make it with him. It was a dangerous thing, Paul knew, to mention it. He scrambled to change his answer. 

“I mean, yeah. It wasn’t just him,  y’know , but it was while he was there that I realized something larger was, er, at play,” he said, hoping that George bought it. He hated lying, especially to someone he’d learned to trust, but he couldn’t afford the truth.  “I freaked out.”

“Right,” George said. 

“Anyway,” he continued, careful to keep it low, “I saw him again, in the street, and he remembered me. I wouldn’t tell him why I’d ‘freaked out’ or whatever he’d said, but he pestered me for a while about it.”

“And he had Ivan get you here,” George concluded on his own, “so he could figure it out.”

Paul nodded with a nervous swallow. “Yeah. Now you know why I was a bit tense.”

George breathed out a chuckle. “Christ. I hope you’ve got your story straight.”

“Me too. ” Trying to make it sound like an offhanded question, he asked, “ But, say, George, do you know John already?”

“I’ve heard of ‘ im ,” came the answer, but it wasn’t George’s. 

Paul started when he felt a presence beside him. A glance told him that John had joined their conversation uninvited and could have been listening for who knew how long. 

“How long have you been listening?”

“What, you’ve got a secret?” he snickered  feindishly . 

Paul ignored this, hoping John would forget. “You heard of him?”

“Yep. From Ivan, ‘course.”

“But you’d never met before?” he looked back and forth between George and John. 

They shook their heads. 

His heart sank. 

“Paul?” George sounded worried. He knew what he must have been thinking; he was wondering about the historical significance of he and John knowing each other, because that could be the only matter of importance that would concern Paul. 

“No, it’s nothing,” he said hurriedly to George alone  and gave him a significant . He hoped that would placate him. 

“Well, just so everyone knows each other,” John backed away, motioning to the rest of the room with his arm. “Paul, George, this is Stuart Sutcliffe, our bassist.” He mussed Stu’s hair, at which Stu merely raised his brows and fixed John with an exasperated look. “And Stan, over there, the drummer.” 

He said ‘the drummer’ considerably less enthusiasm. 

Paul nodded blandly in acknowledgement. 

“A little birdie,” John began, leaning slowly and dramatically in Ivan’s direction, before circling back upright, “told me that you play the guitar, McCartney. That right?”

Surprised, he said, “Uh, I guess.”

George snorted beside him. “You guess? You’re definitely more than a  _ guess _  on guitar.”

John’s eyes lit. 

Paul sent his friend a look that expressed his  _ very sincere _  thanks for that particular comment. George simply grinned. 

“Well, then, Paulie?” John demanded. “How’s ‘bout you show us what you got?” His voice was crude, as though he didn’t actually expect Paul to have much to show. 

“No, I’d really rather not -”

That was, evidently, not an acceptable answer. John shook his head and  tsked . “This will not do.” He picked up his guitar and proffered it to Paul. “It’s obligatory, see,” he explained. 

Paul scoffed skeptically. “Obligatory.”

“Yes,” he said, as though it were obvious. “In that I told you to do it, and now you have to.”  He crossed his arms and fixed him with a sanctimonious, expectant look. “Come on. If you  _ indulge us _ ,” he bargained pompously, “then I’ll consider takin’ a rest, for a while, from getting to the bottom of whatever you’re  hidin ’.”

An attractive offer, that.

Looking to George for help and getting nothing, he sighed. “Fine,” he agrees. It was succumbing to peer pressure. He all but snatched the guitar from John and fixed the strap over his shoulder. 

“Careful with that, son,” John scolded the harsh treatment. “And I hope you know it’s backwards.”

Paul looked from the John to the guitar, then back again. “Oh, is it? Hadn’t noticed.”  He had to set it straight in his mind to picture the strings upside-down as his right hand found placement on the frets and his left rested lower. 

He could all but  _ feel  _ George grinning as he strummed the first chord that came to mind, the D major. It was harsh and discordant, ringing out like the thing hadn’t been toughed in years. 

“God,” he said, his voice bordering on disgust. “How the  _ fuck _  is this thing tuned?” 

Moving over to one of the empty benches so he could tune it more comfortably and to avoid standing there awkwardly, he tightened the strings accordingly. Because he was so adamantly looking down at the strings and listening to their tone, he missed the vaguely uncomfortable glance John sent Stuart at being upstaged . They  couldn’t help but look back at Paul, curious. 

Once he’d gotten it tuned, Paul paused a moment, struggling to find a song he knew how to play that had been written by this time. There were a few that he thought  _ might  _ have been, but he wanted to be absolutely sure that he wasn’t getting ahead of himself. 

He couldn’t possibly go wrong with Elvis, he figured, so he launched into ‘Jailhouse Rock’ without so much as a warmup. 

It wasn’t perfect.  He'd never  mastered the song, as Elvis was pretty good in his books, but certainly not the best rock and roll had to offer. But Paul, he could admit easily to himself, was a good player, and it sounded decent regardless. 

‘Decent’ to him, though, may not have been ‘decent’ to John. He didn’t know him that well, but Paul fully expected him to be highly critical and  dis inclined to praise. He didn’t particularly need the wound to his pride, though, so he refrained from glancing up at him, and picked another. 

He started the riff that began many Chuck Berry songs almost out of muscle memory, not sure himself which one he was playing until it transitioned into the first verse. 

Though he didn’t sing, he found himself humming along to the tune of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ because it was just the sort of song he couldn’t remain silent through. He hoped, however, that nobody heard his voice over the guitar. 

His foot tapped to the beat ,  and he lost himself in the music. John’s guitar was cheap, but it was a guitar nonetheless, just as good as the player – that is, pretty damn good. 

Most of what he played was just bits and pieces. He only got through a verse and a chorus of the Berry song before moving on,  worried about it becoming boring. It surprised him how hopeful he was to find the approval of John  – and to a certain extent, Stu – when he would finally decide to look up. 

That didn’t happen for a while. He went through much of his repertoire of older songs before he’d realized it, and once he was through, he merely paused, still holding onto the neck of the guitar. He felt like he had to play something more, just to fill the steely silence in the room punctuated only by the audible breath of Stan the drummer in the corner. 

Only after hearing the tense silence did Paul’s fingers begin to tremble. He could feel eyes upon him. He needed something to occupy his fingers, so he plucked out the first riff that happened to be convenient. 

He’d gone through it a couple of times before pausing once more. His eyes grew wide. He hadn’t just played any riff – he'd played the opening to ‘Rebel  Rebel ’, which was most definitely  _ not  _ a ‘contemporary’ song. 

He abruptly took his hands off of the guitar and, instead, rested his forearms on the side of it, leaning forward a bit. He looked around his small audience, somehow reluctantly eager to see their reaction. 

“Why’d you stop?” demanded John. He’d been watching Paul intently, hardly blinking twice. “That was . . . well, that was . . .” Paying him a compliment that wasn’t also a snide jab at his appearance seemed to be a difficult thing for him. “Looks like you  _ can  _ play guitar. Messed up the tuning, though.”

“You were playing banjo chords,” he said blankly, lifting the strap over his head and handing the guitar back. “That’s more than enough. I should get going.”

He looked to George, who made no movements to leave. Resolute to do so whether George followed him or not, Paul moved to go.

“Oh, come on, Paul,” his friend pleaded. “Where’s the harm in  stayin ’ a while?”

_ You know perfectly well the harm _ , his glare said, though  it was true that  George hardly knew  _ half _  of the harm. 

John’s hand found the sleeve of Paul’s jacket, tugging him back onto the bench. Once he was seated, John slung an arm around his shoulder that would have looked  amicably  protective to any onlooker, but Paul knew its purpose was to prevent him from rising again. 

It was domineering, that arm; it was commanding but warm at the same time. Involuntarily, he seemed to lean into John,  b ut caught himself quickly. 

“You really  ought’a  stay,” John said, squeezing his shoulders. “Show us if you’ve got a pretty voice to fit that pretty face.”

Scowling, Paul stated, resolutely, “No. No. That’s not happening.” He shifted away from John as far as he could. “I don’t belong here, really, so can you  _ please  _ just  _ let me go _ ?”

The look in John’s eyes, which had been teasingly playful, became guarded. His eyes were blank, and the smirk on his lips fell to a frown. He straightened his back and retracted his arm as though he’d been burned. 

“Fine. Leave, if you like.”

It was clipped, the order of a man who was quite thoroughly through with his company. 

Paul stood , visibly shocked by the sudden change of heart . It shouldn’t feel this bad, he told himself. He  _ wanted  _ to leave. He  _ wanted  _ nothing more to do with John Lennon. Wh y, then, was he so reluctant ?

He shook his head and turned back towards the door, not caring to look back and see if George had followed. 

~

He hadn’t. 

“He  _ can  _ sing, you know,” he said to the silent room that Paul had voided. “And pretty well at that.”

John shook his head and huffed. “What  _ can’t  _ he do?” he remarked lowly, as if to himself. 

* * *

So, I'm finally back! This past week was spent getting over exhaustion from travelling and getting sick halfway through. And on top of all that, I've been dealing with this pesky hurricane bringing all this rain and flash flooding, so it's made writing kind of difficult (guess it's no secret what part of the world I live in now). Anyway, hope you liked this chapter, and please send your feedback! <3

 


	8. In A Mirror, Darkly

Anger fueled each step that took Paul from the light of the Cavern into the cool summer darkness of the streets. He wasn’t so much angry at John, not anymore. The show in the back room was just the way he was discovering John to be – insistent, unwavering, and prying. The part of him that saw the goodness in everyone wanted to think that there was no malicious intent.  

Nor was he mad at George. Well, he was a bit irritated to discover, once he’d left the Cavern, that George hadn’t followed him, but that was understandable, he supposed. He had left in a fit of emotion, after all, and George wasn’t the sort to indulge such unnecessary angst, if it could be avoided.  

He was mad at himself more than anything. 

He’d made a real mess of things. George and John had, despite his most sincere efforts, met prematurely, thanks to Paul. He had changed the past, he was sure of it. He was careless and foolish, and he feared that history would suffer for it.  

Scathingly, he thought,  _Well, now it doesn’t matter if I see John Lennon anymore. It was all for nothing._  

He could, of course, continue to avoid him as a matter of pride. It wouldn’t be beyond him; he could be quite proud under normal circumstances. He was simply unsure whether it would be worth it, anymore, to continue that scheme to get John to leave him alone; so much energy for such disappointing results.  

Perhaps he should stop this resistance. Perhaps it truly wasn’t worth it to try to mitigate his impact on John’s life. But neither was John worth the effort he would have to take to apologize, more or less, for being so unapproachable (not that he  _needed_ to apologize, as he firmly believed every person had the right to not want to be friends with any other, based upon any or no reason at all – he just felt that he’d been terribly rude, and Paul was polite by nature). That only left waiting. 

He would just wait to see what happened next. He would leave it up to John; maybe he would seek him out once more, and maybe he wouldn’t.  

Telling himself that he wouldn’t care either way worked, to an extent.  

~ 

The following Saturday morning found Paul squinting at the light as it poured through his window; he must have forgotten to draw the curtains before falling into bed.  

He groaned, rolling onto his side to face the wall, and buried his face into the pillow. The light no longer held the yellowish tint of early morning, but he was not rested enough to rise just yet. After all, he’d had a late night.  

Embarrassment and self-loathing flooded him as he remembered his actions the previous night. He could hardly even begin to contemplate the extent to which he had fucked with the course of history as he knew it. Dread lined his stomach as he imagined stepping on a butterfly and accidentally killing the Queen and other such disastrous scenarios. 

So engrossed is he in dwelling on his mistakes that he failed to notice the commotion from downstairs, or the sound of quick footsteps climbing the stairs. Only when a knock on his door was followed by the sharp creak of the door as it opened did he glance toward his door curiously.  

In came George, trudging heavily, as though his shoes were made of lead. His hair was unwashed and under his eyes sat faint circles, a testament to his late night and probable overindulgence in alcohol. Paul knew he had left the pub rather early, but the rest of the lads stayed behind.  

“Uh, hey,” he said groggily.  

George gave him a “Good morning” that was quieter than usual but not as much as Paul had expected. He slumped down on the chair in front of Paul’s desk and spun to look at him.   

“Do you normally just walk into my room uninvited?” Paul must have sounded irritable, but justifiably so, since he had just risen. More than a couple times had George simply walked into his room without so much as a by-your-leave, and Paul was still not used to it.  

He shrugged. “Pretty much,” he said. “Your da’ let me up, though. Blame him.” 

Paul rubbed his eyes and sat up, crossing his legs underneath him, but not getting out from under the sheets. He stifled a yawn and looked at George, waiting for him to announce his purpose here. He never just ‘came by’. Even when he just came to hang around, he always had a ‘reason’ to be there, even if it was just an excuse. Nothing came.  

“...So?” Paul asked. “What’s up?” 

George looked sheepish. “I, er, wanted to apologize,” he said, “for last night.” 

Before he could continue, Paul interrupted, “Nah, it’s fine,” he excused, though the situation was completely  _not_  fine. “I was just . . .  havin ’ a bad day, I suppose. I was a bit dramatic . ”  _Though if you knew what I know, you’d be dramatic, too._ “Nothin’ you did.” 

George shook his head wearily and smiled. “That’s quite true,” he conceded, “but not what I meant.” 

Paul raised a questioning brow.  

“After you left, we hung around for a while,” he explained. Paul nodded, having assumed as much. “Well, it was about the only time I’d ever get my hands on beer – you know, with me lookin’ so young -” 

“And you  _being_ so young,” he pointed out. 

George dismissed this. “Anyway, we all got to drinkin’, cause their drummer – Steve or Stan or whatever his name was – bought some rounds. I think he was just tryin’ to get John an’ Stu to like ‘im, you know, ‘cause he really was just a shit drummer.” 

He chuckled in agreement.  

“And I got to talkin’ with your mate, John,” he continued.  

Paul interjected. “He’s not my mate.” 

“God, don’t I know it,” he scoffed. “I wanted to ask ‘im ‘bout his guitar and those chords, and just the music in general. That’s the only reason I stayed behind; otherwise, I’d have followed you. But he just kept cuttin’ me off – he's rather rude, y’know that? - an’ askin’ me stuff about you. It was a right interrogation.” 

Paul groaned. Not only had he brought John and George together to meet in the first place, he had given them a reason to keep talking. He found himself wishing, oddly, that everything in the world would stop revolving around him.  

It made him wary. “What do you have to be sorry for, then?” 

“Well, as you know, I was drinking,” George said slowly, waiting for Paul’s reaction. For his part, Paul didn’t want to jump to any assumptions just yet, for fear of under- or overestimating the damage that may have been caused. It didn’t stop his face from growing pale with anxiety, however, as he hung on his friend’s words.  

“It was about an hour after you left, I think, that John really got . . . inquisitive. He’d had even more to drink than me, and that bassist finally gotten tired of ‘im and must’ve went, uh, somewhere else. He – John – didn't want anythin’ to do with that drummer after he got the beer, so it was just me and him.” 

“What did he ask you?” 

“ _Everything_ ,” George said, exasperated. “He shot off so many questions that I could only hear about half of ‘ em  and answer a fourth , at best . And, o’ course, they were  _all about you._ ” 

Paul bit his lip, nervous. Had George revealed anything last night that he shouldn’t have? 

He must have seen the question in his eyes, because George assured, “I didn’t say anythin’ that I wouldn’t have known before all of this happened, honest.” 

“You’re sure?” 

“Yes, I'm very sure.” he swore. “I was drunk but I remember everything. I said more than I  _should_  have, maybe, but nothin’ . . . sensitive.”  

It was a comfort to realize that Paul fully believed George. “I trust you,” he sighed. “But what  _did_ you tell him?” 

George leaned back, trying to remember. “Most of it was the usual – how long I’d known you, how I’d met you, what you’re like. I mean, it’s not  _exactly_  usual, but it wasn’t exactly  _un_ usual, either. Nothing, y’know, weird – not that I’d tell ‘im, even if he asked, mind.” 

It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Lennon had asked such a battery of questions. He could imagine it now: the relentless look in his eye, an almost crazed look, as he waited to hear what was undoubtedly a fascinating answer to his question about Paul from George. He could imagine the way that John would lean in closer to hang on George’s every word. He felt rather sorry for George for having been subjected to such a Spanish Inquisition that he could hardly have been prepared for.  

“He ask you anythin’ else?”  

“Well, I mentioned that you sing,” he said, and upon seeing Paul’s scowl, apologized. “Sorry. But it’s not that much of a reach to assume, y’know. Just think of it as me savin’ you from any more of his pestering.” 

Paul rolled his eyes. “Saving me? Now that he knows, he’ll just be  _more_ insistent.” 

George shrugged. “It’s jus’ singin’, McCartney. You’ve never been nervous before.” 

He was wrong about that. Perhaps the Paul that George knew wouldn’t have been nervous, but the Paul that was certainly had his fair share of stage fright.  

“I’m not  _nervous_ ,” he insisted. “I jus’ don’t want him bothering me about it – about anythin’ – anymore.” 

After a moment’s silence, George questioned, “What’s so bad about ‘im, anyway? Sure, he’s curious, but you can come up with jus’ anything, really, that would get ‘im off your back. Any old lie.” Paul was about to protest. “And it’s mostly your obvious dislike, or discomfort, or whatever it is, that’s encouraging it. I’m sure you’d even get along with ‘im if you just got over it.” 

Well, way to be sensitive.  

“There’s more than just him being nosy,” Paul argued. “There’s a bigger reason why I avoided him.” 

“And that is . . .?” 

He might as well just tell George. He knew so much already that this one detail would hardly matter. A part of him figured that George even deserved to know. Paul took a breath. “Well, John’s kind of . . . familiar.” 

George’s brows furrowed. “You knew him? From the future?” He whistled slowly. “God, now I see why -” 

He shook his head. “No, no, I didn’t  _know_  ‘ im . Not personally. But I knew  _of_ him, which is really just as good . . . well, actually, just as bad.” 

He waited for George to process this before explaining further.  

“I worked at a music shop,” he prefaced, not remembering if he’d mentioned that to George before or not. “And we had this one record from sometime in the sixties that nobody ever looked twice at – from a band that hardly anybody knew when they were active and that  _nobody_ knew fifty years after they split.” 

“And it was John’s record?” 

Paul nodded. “He had a band. I  _think_ that bassist, Stu, was still in it. A couple of other people, a drummer an’ guitarists an’ everythin’, ‘course, because it was a real, legitimate band. Just not a, uh, real good one.” 

He tilted his head. “I thought they were all right las’ night,” he mused. “Well, John was all right, at least. How bad must those ‘other people’ have been?” 

“Well,” he said slowly, trying to find the right words. He couldn’t honestly say that they were terrible, which was his first instinct – he simply couldn’t say that about George’s playing or John’s singing. “You could say they weren’t too  _compatible_ , in a sense.” 

“You’re sayin’ that John can sing but nobody can play,” he concluded.  

Again, he found it hard to completely agree. “I mean,” he hesitated. “It wasn’t all bad. I just meant that they didn’t play too well together. It was . . . lesser than the sum of its parts, I suppose, or like adding a negative.”  

To George, that sounded exactly like what he’d said, which confused him. He could tell that Paul was skirting around giving a completely honest analysis of the group. “I’m not really following you.” 

He wished he could just tell George that he and John were the only talented musicians in the group, that it wasn’t just John. Though loyalty to his new friend gave him reservations about saying that the band, which included said friend, blemished their front man, he couldn’t reveal that George was a member of the band to begin with.  

“I guess you’d have to hear it. The thing just sat on the shelf from the day the boss hired me to the day I left – I only gave it a listen once, when I could find nothin’ else to do, and I’m sure I was the only one there who ever did.” 

He nodded. “I wonder . . . Who were the other members?” 

Paul tried not to look unwilling to answer. He attempted a look of mild confusion, as though he couldn’t remember. “I’m, uh, not really sure,” he answered uncertainly. “As I said, I  _think_ one of them was Stu.”  _And one of them was George Harrison_ _, but that’s all very need-to-know_ _._  

“But if you can’t remember their names, what made you remember John’s? Was it his name in the title or something?” George saw through him, he just knew it. He wasn’t a good liar.  

“No . . .” He scrambled to find a realistic reason why he would remember John in particular. He was pleasantly surprised when several came to mind rather easily: “I s’pose it’s ‘cause he was the lead singer and songwriter. I read the back. And it was the name itself – Lennon, you know. Or Lenin. Like Vladmir.” 

Did he sound like he was trying too hard to justify it?  

Then, he remembered the real reason why Lennon had stood out to him more, even, than George had at the time, and he felt so incredibly daft for not recalling it first. “And I’d looked at the record sleeve just that day, too. That last day. I got bored and looked up the names. Y’know, on the Internet, just to know a bit more about it. Then, later, I remembered John ‘cause he’s the one I met first, at that pub.” He tried not to hold his breath, tried to breath deeply to calm his racing heart. He  _really_ didn’t do well with lying.  

George held back a grin from his lips but he couldn’t keep it from his eyes. “Mate, you can stop it now. I know you’re lyin’.” 

 _Fuck._  Had he laid it on too thick? Perhaps he should have taken a drama course back in school; he never could have foreseen its practical uses.  

He decided, perhaps unwisely, to play innocent. “ I – I don’t know what you mean.” 

“God, you always were  _such_ a shitty liar.” He paused to laugh for a moment. It was the sort of laugh that didn’t come entirely from humor. “Say all that stuff about Lennon  _is_ true – it’s not unbelievable, really. It  _is_   an uncommon name, and I know you  _did_  meet him that first night. But, even with that, half of any lie isn’t  _what_ you tell, it’s the  _way_ you tell it. You can’t just come up with excuse after excuse and expect it to sound like the truth.” 

Affronted, he opened his mouth to defend himself, but could find nothing to say. George’s points were valid.  

“And, even if you did say it right, even if you didn’t ramble on and on, I’d still know you’re lying.” 

Paul narrowed his eyes. “. . . How?” Did George know something already? “What is it that you know – er, that you  _think_ you know?” 

“Oh, I don’t  _know_ anythin’ specific. I doubt most people would even see it. I only do ‘cause I’ve known you so long,” he said. “It’s just that, every time you lie, you move your mouth a just a little bit after you’re done talkin’.” George brought up his thumb and index finger, holding them close together. “It’s small, like you’re saying it back to yourself to make sure it sounds right, but I’ve known you long enough by now to recognize it.” 

“I - I don’t do that -” 

“Yes, you do, Paul. You did it in the past, you must’ve done it in the ‘future’, and you do it now.” 

Paul closed his eyes. Everything he did, every decision he made, gave him the worst possible results. He’d hoped beyond hope that John wouldn’t be performing at the Cavern, but he’d brought George along anyway. Then, he’d decided that telling George even more sensitive information was, somehow, a good idea, but that had clearly backfired, as well, since Paul couldn’t properly limit his divulgence.  

He let himself fall back onto his pillow and held his head in his hands. He needed to simply stop talking and reduce future damage; he knew he couldn’t possibly repair what he’d already done.  

“You’re transparent. You remember the other bandmates; I can tell you do. Sure, you’d remember John, in particular, because you ran into him first – but that’s just the thing. A minute ago, you said John’s ‘the one you met  _first_.’” There was a gleam in his eye as Paul’s hands clenched around tufts of his unruly hair. “You’ve met someone else.” 

Was there anything he could possibly say by way of explanation? George had the story pretty well already.  

His friend leaned back into the chair, as if waiting expectantly. “Well? You gonna tell me?” 

“No,” was all he could say.  

“At last, the truth,” George sighed.  

“Well, I guess you could count Stu,” he said, as if that was any consolation.  

He scoffed. “You haven’t really  _met_ him. You don’t know him.  Have you even had five words with him? Have you had  _any_?” 

Paul didn’t have a good answer to that.  

“You could have just said that you didn’t want to tell me,” George said, more gently. “It’s better than lying, I’d say.” 

“You think I hadn’t considered that?” Paul demanded. “It’d just make you suspicious. ‘No, I can't tell you.’ Why not? ‘I can’t tell you that either.’” 

“And you tryin’ to lie is any  _less_ suspicious?” He folded his arms. “C’mon, Paul. I thought you could trust me well enough not to pry too much. I’ll respect your privacy, I will. It just, well, it hurts when you lie to me like that.” 

He sounded so sincere, so kind, so calm, that it was like a knife cutting through his chest. “I’m sorry, Geo,” he said in a small voice. “God, I’m such a terrible friend – I'm a terrible  _replacement_ for a friend. You don’t deserve this.” 

George let out a long breath. “Jesus, mate, I want you to stop lying, not fall into depression.” He tugged the chair closer to the bed by his feet and nudged Paul’s shoulder comfortingly. “You really  _are_ dramatic. I had been hoping it was just when you were drunk.” 

It lightened the mood slightly. “Nope,” Paul said, slowly letting go of his hair. “That wasn’t me drunk last night. It was just me.” 

~ 

Not long thereafter, George departed, leaving Paul to spend the rest of his morning – what little there was of it – in peace. It gave him, George, a chance to process what he’d learned.  

It was a big piece of the story that had been kept from him. That was understandable, to an extent; Paul knew things from the future that George probably shouldn’t know. He should feel lucky to be only partially privy to the situation with John, even if it wasn’t the whole picture. Knowing that he  _shouldn’t_ know something, however, in no way made him less intent to know it. 

At least, now, he knew why Paul was so hesitant to meet John again: he was afraid of changing the future. 

That mindset made little sense to George; the way he saw it, some things would happen, whether Paul wanted them to or not, and regardless of the course of history that Paul thought was set in stone. George conceded that it was unnatural to change the past, but since it was unnatural to have the opportunity to do so in the first place, there could be no set rules for what can or can’t happen, or what should or shouldn’t. Everything about the situation was unnatural, and Paul was powerless to try and make it natural again. He was wasting his energy.  

Of course, George didn’t even hope to convince him of this; Paul was so stubbornly set in his ways that tangible proof wasn’t always enough to change his mind; philosophical musings on an abstract topic certainly wouldn’t do it, either.  

In the end, George figured that he shouldn’t worry. He saw nothing to worry about, in the first place. His only concern had been Paul’s bad habit of lying, and that had already been discussed. Even if there was something to worry about, George remained blissfully ignorant of it, and Paul did enough worrying for the both of them.  

~ 

John woke slowly. For what felt like both hours and minutes, he slipped in and out of the in-between state in which he was both awake and dreaming. As he became more alert, he found that the light filtering through the grimy window was not the yellow tint of an early morning sun, but rather, the dull slated blue of the overcast midday. He had certainly slept in.  

He rubbed his eyes and blinked away the little bit of blur that was caused by sleep; the rest of it was just his ineffective eyesight. Sitting up, he glanced around the room once before calling, “Stu? Hey, Stu!” 

His own voice reverberated and echoed inside his head, painfully colliding with the drums of his ears and amplifying the sound. His head throbbed and he winced, cursing himself for having called out so loudly.  

His bedroom door swung open, and Stu sauntered in, looking no worse for wear. John remembered the previous night well; he remembered how much he’d drunk, once Paul had gone, and how much more, once Paul’s little friend had followed him out. It was no small amount. And though John was certainly hungover, the consequences of alcoholic overindulgence seemed not to grace Stuart that morning. He tried to justify it with the fact that Stu was a naturally early riser, but he knew that it was just that Stu hadn’t had half as much to drink.  

“Finally risen from your slumber, ‘ave you?” Stuart asked in a voice that sent sharp spikes of iron through John’s skull with impunity. “Decided to grace the land of the living with your esteemed presence?” 

John shook his head. “Quiet,” he hissed. “Jus’ tell me what time t’is.” 

Stu was a man of naturally soft voice and mild manner. It struck John as quite prickish in a very out-of-the-way manner when Stuart simply laughed, loud and obnoxious, and announced, “It’s half two, you big idiot,” before swiftly tugging the blanket off of the bed (and off of John) in one fell swoop.  

~ 

After being rather rudely evicted from the comforting cocoon of his bed, John stumbled out of his room and into the bathroom, grumbling and cursing all the way. He threw nasty glares at Stu before closing the door and running what he expected to be a very warm shower, before discovering that his angel of a roommate must have (intentionally, no doubt) used up all the hot water, leaving him with something barely lukewarm.  

The shower itself did nothing to make him more alert, but the short period of time between stepping out and drying off, when the drops of water caught every little draft in the room, certainly did the job.  

Stu had brewed some coffee – black, with no sugar, which left the bitter taste of regret in John’s mouth. They sat in their small, musty living room in absolute silence for several moments as John waited for the caffeine to kick in.  

Once his headache began to subside, he leaned back against the sofa and sighed, which Stu took as a nonverbal invitation to speak.  

“Yesterday was certainly something, John, wasn’t it?” 

Partly because he wasn’t sure where Stu was going with this and partly because his throat felt like sandpaper, John simply nodded.  

His roommate nodded along with him. His expression told John that he was having a conversation with himself – he did a lot of things just in that head of his, John knew, which both infuriated and enchanted him. After what seemed to be several exchanges of various ideas and positions, he settled on saying, “D’you reckon he plays bass?” 

The ‘who’ in question was certainly no mystery. The question itself, however, lead John to even more questions of his own.  

Firstly, he scoffed, “No idea. And after las’ night, mate, I doubt I’ll ever know.” 

Stu tilted his head. “You really think you missed your shot?” 

John crossed his arms and took a large sip of coffee to sooth his throat. “Shot at what, exactly?” 

“You know,” Stu intoned. “Your shot at getting' to know ‘im, if you like. Your shot at getting ‘im in the band, which  _I_ like. Or, your shot at solving whatever mystery you’ve found in ‘im that’ll just turn out to be another one of your useless endeavors.” 

John scoffed. “He’s made it abundantly clear that I never had a  _shot_ at anything to begin with.” He took another sip. “Good to know that you only care as far as it’ll get you out o’ the band, though.” 

He sighed. “You know this ain’t my gig, John. You promised to look for a bassist.” 

“And this one fell through, a’right?” John snapped. To himself, he muttered, “He was never even ‘one’ to begin with.” 

John’s ill demeanor was largely due to his hangover. The hangover was fully due to a gross overindulgence in beer the previous night. And the overindulgence was very probably due to what caused the rest of the hangover – Paul McCartney, of course.  

He’d started drinking more heavily once the lad stormed off. He just set aside John’s guitar – which he’d completely messed up by tuning, by the way; John knew perfectly well how to tune a guitar the way he needed it tuned – and left. People didn’t  _do_ that to John Lennon; they didn’t leave until he made it clear that they shouldn’t be there any longer. That kid, George, had known it; he'd stayed. Stu had known it, always. Paul knew it, he was sure, and chose, deliberately, to ignore it.  

John couldn’t let that go.  

He had extended his arm, metaphorically, in friendship. He wouldn’t let anyone touch his guitar if he didn’t like them, after all. He’d made an effort to show Paul that he wanted to know him and understand him (ignoring the fact that those efforts could only come across as intrusive prodding), only to be rejected. That didn’t sit well.  

His temper had flared at that and still had not receded.  

“It’s a right shame,” Stu mused. “He wasn’t bad, y’know. Of course you know. But even I liked his playing, and you know me, I hardly like anything.” He fixed his eyes on John. “I'm sure it's a loss on both his part and the band’s, but you must understand, mate, that he may jus’ not like you.” 

John ran a hand through his damp hair. “ _Why not_ , though?” He flinched at how childishly petulant he both sounded and felt.  

“Jesus, I don’t know, John,” Stu said. “It just happens. What makes you care so much, anyway? It can’t be the music, since he only just played yesterday, and I’ve had to sit through a week of your pathetic pining already. Can’t you just get over the fact that, maybe, not everybody will worship the ground you walk on?” 

John glared. “Jealous?” he accused. He knew it wasn’t the best thing to say, but his impulsive side made him say it anyway. 

It was no secret between them that Stu had a rather, ahem, unconventional set of characteristics to which he was attracted. It was something he had admitted to John one late night after too many drinks and too much emotional discussion that would bore even birds, and John could dealt with the knowledge easily enough by ignoring it. Ignorance truly was bliss, and though he couldn’t be truly ignorant, John could certainly try.  

Stu’s eyes darkened and John knew he’d struck a sore spot, as was his intention. Nobody could honestly have said that John was a ‘nice’ guy to be friends with; he used vulnerabilities to his advantage against anyone.  

Recovering quickly, Stu returned, “Is there any reason to be?” 

“Shut it, Sutcliffe,” John said, swearing to himself.  

If he’d said yes, well, he was admitting that there was some level of ‘competition’ - which there most certainly was  _not_ , since John didn’t play that game in the first place, even if Paul did. He was sure Paul didn’t, though.  

And if he’d said no, the implication was slightly more subtle. It would mean that Stu had no competition in his game, as though the goal were even attainable to him, and was assured victory, which he wasn’t. Perhaps it could be said that Stu had competition with reality.  

“I’m just saying, John. Your obsession is a  _bit_ odd.” 

“I am not obsessed,” he denied.  

“Of course you’re not.” 

* * *

So, there it is! I don't have the next chapter completely written (and I like to be a full chapter ahead), but just now, I typed out a rough outline for where the story's going, and I'll just say, I'm excited! That being said, while it's got a few 'definitely gonna happen's, I'd like to know if you guys have any ideas or theories about what you think would/should happen, please let me know! I just got over some pretty bad writing block, so I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. I appreciate your feedback, as always, and thanks for reading! 

 


	9. Denmark is a Prison

“Your mum makes the best pot roast I’ve  _ ever  _ tasted,” Paul remarked as he shut the front door to the Harrison household  and followed George down the drivewa y into the cool summer darkness.

It was a Tuesday night. Paul had gone over to George’s place after his shift at  McGinty’s  ended, and as the two of them fell into a surprisingly in-depth discussion about the propriety of the phrase ‘keep me company’, the time had quite swiftly gotten away from them. By the time he bothered to check his watch and make his way  to  the front door , planning to head home and start dinner,  Mrs. Harrison was  already  setting him a place at their table for supper.  To refuse  would  simply be rude, though he wouldn’t  have dared ,  once he caught the scent of  what she’d prepared . 

He’d phoned his father quickly to let him know that there was leftover stew in the icebox, since he wouldn’t be home for dinner. 

George laughed. He was always in a good mood after he’d eaten , which was something Paul noticed he did often and with great fervor. With a mother who cooks like that, he could hardly be blamed , though how he was still stick-thin was a mystery.  “Mate, you say that every time.”

Of course, Paul didn’t know that he’d said it every time , as  this was  _ his  _ first experience of the Harrisons’ food , but he knew he would have.  “And every time, it’s true!”

They walked along the path to the bus stop. George’s mum had insisted that he accompany Paul; George, ever the mummy’s boy (and not wanting to listen to his father’s rather boring radio program), hadn’t put up too much of a fight.  Paul was grateful for the company.

The bus stop was quiet around this time of night; George’s neighborhood was never too terribly busy, anyway. They had the bench completely to themselves as they waited.  Paul sat very still as he listened to the sound of the city, his arms folded across his chest. He cut  quite  the opposite figure of George, who leaned back against the armrest, feet propped up in Paul’s direction. He looked to be deep in thought.

“Hey, Paul,” George said  pensively  after a few moments of silence. 

“What?”

“D’you ever wonder what it’d be like to, maybe, play in a band?”

Paul, who’d been gazing lazily at the cloudy night sky, looked to George. “I guess I have.  Hasn’t everybody?  But not   seriously, y’know. My da’s always wanted me to do something  _ successful  _ and  _ stable  _ . . . music doesn’t exactly fit that job description.”

“I have,” George said, as if his previous question hadn’t already revealed that. 

Paul shrugged. “You’re good enough. I bet you could do it.” _ Well, actually, I  _ know _  you can do it.  _

He scoffed. “Well, if I can, so can you,” he said, and grinned. “You sing real well, and you play decent. I play  _ more _  than well, and sing decent. What makes you think you can’t make it?”

Giving him a wry glance, he replied, “I never could have made it with what I wanted to play back in the . . . well, back in the future. I didn’t like the right stuff.”

“You an ’  me, we could be a band. Or a duo, I guess, rather. Like the Everly Brothers.”  Assertively, George said, “You could make it here. I’m sure of it.”

Paul gave a humorless laugh and glanced at him. “I’m not sure that’s exactly at the top of my priorities, now."

“You think you’ll  be goin ’  back, then?”  His expression was more than skeptical.

“You don’t?” The reluctant silence that followed told him all he needed to know.  “I really don’t know what to think,” he said honestly. 

George looked at him intently. “Do you  _ hope  _ you’ll go back?”

“Yes,” he said automatically, then paused. George almost looked hurt – or ,  perhaps, it was just surprise .  “But – oh, I don’t really know.”

That almost seemed to please him. He didn’t say anything, but  his sharp features seemed to soften, and his eyes glanced away as  he smiled . It touched  Paul  to know  that  George didn’t want  him  to leave . 

“Do  _ you  _ hope I’ll go back?” he wondered. 

George tilted his head. “Why would I?”

“Oh, come on,” Paul said. “You know why. So you can have your own Paul back, and I’m back where I’ve always been.”

“Of course not,” George said. “I don’t really miss you, y’know. Odd to sa y that, especially  _ to  _ you , but I don’t . There’s nothin’ to miss. . I don’t see how there’s anything wrong with you –  anythin ' lacking, I mean. I’ve said before, and I wasn’t lying, that you’re still the same lad I’ve always known.”

Paul didn’t want to mention just how unbelievable that sounded to him. It almost seemed like George was betraying the person he knew before, like he was moving on too quickly. Perhaps he was just saying it for Paul’s benefit; it was easier to believe than what he was actually saying. 

“What’s got you  thinkin ’ about playing in a band, anyway?”  he asked to change the subject. 

He shrugged. “It just occurred to me, a while ago,” he said, “that John’s band – the Beetles or whatever they call themselves – it’s just got a drummer, bassist,  an’  rhythm guitar.”

“And?”

“No lead. There’s no lead guitar.”

Paul’s lips parted minutely as he understood what George was hinting at. “Ah.”

He didn’t know quite how to feel about the idea of George wanting to join the band. Obviously, in proper history, that is exactly what would happen eventually, so from one perspective, he should have no qualms with it. On the other hand, Paul’s hand in their premature meeting may have sparked another premature event; would George be joining the band too soon?

There was no way he could know, he concluded. Trying to sound as neutral as possible, he asked, “Have they offered you a spot?”

He shook his head. “No, ‘course not. I’ve only just met ‘em, an’ they don’t even know I play.”

“And are you going to tell them?” 

The whole question of “them”, Paul knew, was just out of politeness  to  Stu and drummer what’s-his-name; they both knew John really was the  leader and deciding factor of the band. 

“Maybe,” George said. “I jus’ wanted to know if you had any problems with it.”

Paul looked at him contemplatively.  “Geo ,” he said, “even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to stop you.”

He scoffed. “That’s quite a change of pace from earlier. What happened to ‘under no circumstances can I  _ ever  _ even  _ possibly _  change the future?’”

“It’s still a hotly contested issue in the deep recesses of my mind,” Paul said , tapping his temple.  “But I quite honestly don’t know at this point  what will and what won’t change things, or what I can even do about it. Maybe I’ve already ruined it  beyond the point of no return, and maybe the best option I have is to just let things . . . happen on their own, and see how they turn out.”

He still had that small urge to say something to dissuade George from any hasty decisions, but there truly was no way he could foresee the result of such a thing. If George took his word too close to heart, he may have been dissuaded from joining John at all. Paul really had very little control anymore. 

George raised his brows and said, “It’s nice to know you treat the entirely of the future like a science experiment,” but didn’t argue.

~

His fingers buzzed long after the strings ceased to do so; he could feel the vibration spreading fast and slow at the same time throughout his body. In his ears resounded a heartbeat on time with the music he’d played, loud and heavy. He’d never before been so nervous doing something that was so natural. 

George looked down at his guitar for a moment, his left hand still naturally positioned to hold the strings down. Though he’d heard more of his own heartbeat than his music, he figured he’d played reasonably well.

In an unnatural display of slight apprehension, he looked up to his audience. 

John stood across from him, analytically taking in every small detail with how intently he started at George’s guitar. He imagined the older man critiquing the position of his thumb on the neck, or the exact angle his forearm made, or perhaps th e tapping of   his foot too much as he played. 

They stood in the basement of Ivan Vaughan’s mother’s house. The small window near the ceiling was the only light in the place, but it was positioned in such a way as to capture the most intense light of the late afternoon. There was a tattered sofa against one wall and old folding lawn chairs against another. Neither seemed very inviting. 

Ivan had overturned a bucket and seated himself off to the side. His role in this meeting was to get John somewhere that George could meet with him; of course, he’d not expected the place to be the kid’s basement, but he supposed it was better than nothing. Apparently, he had John and others over quite often, and his mother grew tired of their less-than-spectacular show of musical prowess, and confined them to the basement.

“So you can play guitar,” John remarked in an unimpressed manner that implied,  _ What of it?  _ Something about his lack of reaction told George that he’d made a good impression.  Or, at least, not a bad one.

He smiled to himself. “Well, it’s just that. I can play guitar. Not rhythm; lead.”

John raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “I’d gathered that. What did you want, then? Just to upstage Paul?”

He shook his head, still smiling. “I told you, I’m not here about Paul.”

And it was true. In fact, upon seeing him, George had announced, ‘I’m not here to talk about Paul, just so you know.’ He’d gone on to say, without much modesty, but also without abundant pride, that he was rather good on the guitar, and thought John might want to hear it. He was pleased when John decided to humor him. 

John nodded to himself. “All right. You know your way around the guitar; I’ll  even  say that you’re pretty good. But what do you want? Are you trying to get in the band?”

“Yes,” George said simply. 

“How old are you, anyway? Fifteen?”

“Eighteen.”

He seemed to consider a moment, but waved his hand errantly before crossing his arms. “Sorry, mate, but application’s not open.”

George’s face was dispassionate as he took the unsubtle rejection. There was no disappointment to hide, in fact. He had found John, very early on, to be quite prideful; he wouldn’t just  _ let  _ someone into the band simply because they asked. He had to be the one to decide that they belonged. 

(George was also quite noticeably better than him; it was another wound to his pride.)

But he had planted the seed of an idea into John’s head, and once they parted, it would grow, and the idea would, eventually, disguise itself as his own. 

“Worth a shot,” he shrugged nonchalantly. 

Slightly caught off-guard with how well he had taken the news, John’s eyes visibly widened just so. 

George ducked his head to lift the guitar strap over it and set the instrument aside, turning away and looking preoccupied for a moment, sensing that John still had something to say. 

He didn’t disappoint. “I really don’t see the need to change up the band,” he said as justification, something George knew to be a complete lie. John had to be dying to get someone who could actually play. 

He even had a suspicion as to why he was hesitant to take George on, aside from the pride; he feared that, once he got a lead guitarist, he would no longer have a reason to pursue Paul as a second guitarist. 

There was no feeling of competition with Paul. He knew they had different strengths and skills, and George’s just happened to be the ones that the band needed the most direly. After all, John did the singing (which was one of Paul’s virtues) and the rhythm (which wasn’t Paul’s expertise, so to speak, but he could do it well enough). George, on the other hand, could fingerpick better than either of them, and actually knew guitar chords. 

“Oh, no,” George waved off. “I get it.”

He prepared to leave. Neither John nor Ivan were friends of his; he knew both of them only through Paul, and even then, not particularly well. What he did know was that he had plenty of time and musical ambition, and he ought to take any chance he might have. 

“Maybe sometime later,” John added noncommittally before he could go. 

“Just let me know, then.”

He began to ascend the stairs to the hatch door that lead to Ivan’s yard. Just as he had twisted the latch to lift the door, John spoke up. George had almost heard him reconsidering. 

“Hey, uh,” he began, “d’you play bass, by any chance?”

George turned back to him and grimaced expressively. “Tried to,” he said. “It’s not too much my thing.”

John looked disappointed. He raised his eyebrows almost in defeat, shuffling. “Well - I know you said you weren’t here for him, but does McCartney?”

He pushed up the door to expose the room to much brighter sunlight, smiling to himself. “Why don’t you ask him?”

~

The pages of the journal – Paul refused to call it a diary, even if he hadn’t written in it himself – were now well used to the prints of his fingers. He spent hours each week reading through its contents, hoping to know as much as he could about the life he now lead. 

It was a mild curiosity, on top of practical applications , that drove him to read it over and over.  He’d in passing wondered what his life would have been like if he had been alive in the sixties, just as he had wondered about the forties, or the nineteenth century, or the middle ages. Now, he had no confirmation that he would, in fact, have been a medieval troubadour, or a vaudevillian performer, but he had the unique opportunity to know exactly how he would have lived in the middle of the twentieth century, because he  _ did  _ live it. 

About a week after he and George had gone through the catastrophe of the gig at the Cavern, Paul had almost come to grips with the fact that he may have changed the course of history irreversibly. He had tried not to panic  _ too  _ obviously the following morning when George had approached him, because that foolish part of him still thought he could hide a bit more from his friend in the hopes that it would help solve his problem. After he’d left, though, he had spiraled into his thoughts so deeply that his father, brother, and alarm clock would not jar him from. 

He eventually came to the conclusion that there was nothing he could do. He hadn’t actively tried to make anything ‘bad’ happen – though he knew that there was nothing either good or bad, but thinking made it so, and any change in history could go either way – and his actions otherwise had even had  that very effect . 

His conclusion was that, since he could not foresee the results of any action he took either way, he would simply do, and await the result of his doing. He would act with no intention in regards to trying to keep history straight, as his attempts before had been in vain. 

So, there he sat, thumbing through the journal for a page he wasn’t as familiar with, and finding none. It reminded him of all the times he’d watched old sitcoms, trying to find an episode that he couldn’t remember too well; in other words, it was a futile effort. 

Soon, his eyelids grew heavy and his hand began to shake. It was either late night or early morning, and his body began to feel it. He set the book down on the desk, not in the drawer or on the shelf, as he usually would have done, and yawned, leaning back in his chair a moment to rub his eyes before resigning himself to bed. 

Dreams had begun to descend upon him incompletely in that indecisive way they have before one has fully fallen asleep; he was jumping over puddles in his backyard after a heavy rain, trying his best to avoid the splash, but the picture wasn’t quite in focus because he wasn’t quite asleep. 

It was growing steadily clearer, though, and he felt himself drifting away. 

~

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been gone. Dreams could last forever when they  only seemed to last  a moment, he knew, though he didn’t remember them at all once he woke. He only had the faintest notion that he was trying to find something he’d lost when he was suddenly pulled into alertness by the sound of banging elsewhere in the house. 

As his eyes flew open, he pushed himself up partially from the bed to see what had caused the noise that disturbed him. Blood rushed to his head and made the room spin for a moment; he briefly noticed that he hadn’t moved once all night, which would account for the vertigo. 

The pale blue light of early morning filtered through his window. He glanced at the clock on his bedside table; it read ten minutes to seven. It was an ungodly hour to be awake on a Sunday. 

Were it not for the very real sensations of being too cold when the blanket began to slip from his shoulders, he would have assumed that he was still dreaming. 

The knocking persisted. Paul might as well get the door so it wouldn’t wake his father or brother. 

When he got to the door, he called, “Just a mo’,” in a sleepy voice, urging whoever was calling upon their household to cease the incessant banging.  

Before opening the door, he raised himself up on his toes to peer through the peephole in the door. It took him a moment to recognize the figure standing outside through the fish-eye lens. 

He couldn’t see the man’s face, but that impeccably-styled auburn hair left no question of who it was. 

Briefly considering his options, Paul decided that simply ignoring him would be both impractical, since he’d already announced his presence, and rude. He was left with no recourse other than to answer the door. 

“Mornin’, mate,” John said amiably, with nothing by way of an explanation, as he stepped into the living room. He was surprisingly casual, as though this was an every-day sort of outing for him. 

Paul, for his part, was rather shocked. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words would come. He tried again. “I’m sorry,” he said, very confused. “Terribly sorry. But  _ what the hell _  are you doing here?”

John had already walked through the living room and peered into the kitchen and bathroom by the time he decided that it pleased him to answer. “Stu’s had some bird stay the night,” he said, “an’ there’s just no peace with her stomping ‘round the place all mornin’.”

Paul’s brows came together in confusion. “Stu had a . . .” he trailed off. He never would have assumed that Stu, the very reserved bassist he’d seen at the pub just a week ago, would have just ‘some bird’ over. There was something about him had given Paul the impression he wasn’t the normal bird-watcher. 

He decided not to mention such a thing to John. Instead, he settled for, “And  _ here  _ was your first choice?”

John just looked at him and shrugged. He’d made his way to the staircase, peering up. He began to climb the stairs. 

“Wait!” Paul protested, launching himself across the room to grab the sleeve of John’s light jacket. “Where d ’ you think you’re going?”

He merely shrugged off Paul’s grip and continued to climb. “You’ve gotta sleep  _ somewhere,  _ yeah?”

Paul followed him. “You are  _ not  _ going into my bedroom,” he declared, but was virtually powerless to stop John from finding the only room with a door that wasn’t completely closed and letting himself in. 

He tried not to spare a glance at the small pile of clothes strewn on the ground by his wardrobe or the slovenly state of his desk. He didn’t want John to see that he cared about how presentable his room was; he tried not to care himself.

“Nice place,” John said, taking it in. 

Paul felt terribly exposed. He wasn’t prepared for visitors. It wasn’t that he didn’t  _ like  _ them, but he liked to know that they were coming first; and, better still, he liked being the one to invite them. 

“How d'you know where I live?” he asked, crossing his arms to try and assuage his discomfort. 

“Ivan,” John supplied simply. 

“That worm.” Paul felt mildly betrayed but not terribly surprised. 

“Oh, he’s a good lad,” John said, sounding like a grandfather excusing his ill-behaved grandson. 

There was a moment’s silence. John had taken to inspecting Paul’s bookshelf, taking a notable interest in the top part. That was where Paul kept the books he’d gotten from his mother, who left her entire (limited) library to him once she died. That was one thing he noticed was congruent with his earlier lifestyle – he kept his mother’s older books at the top of his shelf, where he could most easily access them. 

So, John was the bookish sort. It was something he wouldn’t have expected.

He moved on to the box sitting on the floor beside it, which was Paul’s record collection. He crouched down to flip through the sleeves. Even Paul hadn’t listened to everything he owned yet, though the collection wasn’t exactly extensive. 

Still feeling quite vulnerable about having his room – and practically his life, since he could no longer live on his cell phone – barred before John like a patient etherized upon a table, Paul fidgeted. 

As if sensing his nerves, John turned back to him. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about finding out your secret, Paul.”

It was a waste of time to protest the existence of a secret in the first place; he’d done so before, and John hadn’t believed him. “So, that’s why you’re here.” He wondered if the excuse with Stu had even some small semblance of truth but decided he’d really rather not know. 

“I won’t lie,” John said, resting an elbow on his knee and his chin on his fist, “that’s a part.”

“Just a part?”

“Well, that,” he shrugged, eyes wandering to the side of the room. Paul followed his gaze and found the corner, which held nothing but a lamp and his guitar. “That, and seeing if George is right.”

He didn’t like where this was going. “About what?” 

“Can you sing?”

He’d hoped that wasn’t what was on John’s mind. What approach to the issue would be most appropriate and effective at getting them off this topic? “As well as the next guy, I suppose.”

John was not to be dissuaded by his flippancy. “Sing me something, then.” He found a bare spot on the wall against which to lean, resting his forearms against his propped-up knees. He looked all too comfortable in Paul’s personal space. 

“What? No. It’s seven in the morning on a Sunday.”

“All right, make it a hymn.”

Paul huffed. “It’s seven in the morning,” he repeated, “and everybody’s asleep.”

“We’re not.”

“I’m not singing,” he affirmed, sitting down on his bed. 

He sang to himself often enough, around the house doing chores, showering,  softly as he walked  down the street with no passers-by. But he didn’t sing in front of people. There were a few exceptions, like Ritchie – he'd always made Paul feel comfortable. Any shyness he’d have dissipated around Ritchie. George was almost –  _ almost  _ – the same way. John, however, increased it tenfold. 

Growing up, the kind of music he liked to sing was never popular. He was an older soul, and his taste in music reflected that; hardly anything he listened to was after the eighties – most wasn’t even past the seventies. He could remember the first time he actually saw someone singing on television – it was an old movie with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He’d fallen in love with that old sound and never got over it. 

Since his tastes were so obsolete, he never found somebody to sing with until Ritchie came along – and that was very recently. In school, there would be kids competing in Christmas talent shows singing pop songs and crowd pleasers. Nobody would have welcomed a rendition of nineteen forties  showtunes  or music hall ballads  - he’d have had better luck with that fifties rock ‘n’ roll he’d gone through phases listening to, but it still wasn’t considered fashionable.  It made him rather reserved about his singing talent. Of course, he'd been told by all of his mother and Ritchie that there was, in fact, a talent. 

“Fine, then,” John resigned. “Have it your way . I do think it’s terribly unfair, though,” he continued, “that I’ve sung to you and you haven’t returned the favor .”

He scoffed. “You haven’t sung to me.” Not that he would have minded. 

“Oh, ‘course I did. You came to our gig las’ week, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, all right. I’ll reciprocate once I’ve got a band and a stage to sing on.”

“I could be your private audience,” John simpered.  Paul  rolled  his  eyes. “Oh, I know what this is. You like the power. First, it was the name you wouldn’t tell me , now it’s the voice you won’t let me hear . You jus’ had to have control, didn’t you?”

Slightly surprised by the unexpectedly accurate analysis, he stammered, “N-no. That’s ridiculous.” He waved his hand in the general direction of John’s hair. “All that’s just in your  head ; you made the big deal outta  everythin ’.”

He grinned wickedly. “For all your tryin’, you  really  don’t play hard to get too well. I already found my way to the bedroom.” His tone carried pride at making him immensely uncomfortable.

Paul blushed scarlet, knowing that John didn’t really mean it the way he said it, that it was just a joke, and looked down to shake his head. “John, really.  Why are you here?”

John looked at him with  wide  eyes , attempting a look of childlike innocence without ulterior motives.  “I haven’t seen you in a week,” he said. “Maybe I jus’ missed your company.”

He rolled his eyes. “What do you mean? It’s not like we’re mates.”

Adopting a hurt expression, John said, “But we will be. I can just feel it.”

“So, you’re  tellin ’ me,” he began, laying down on his bed with his head near the foot and his feet propped up against the headboard in an attempt to make himself more comfortable, “that you bothered to find my home address from Ivan and pay me a visit far too early on a Sunday just because you think we  _ might  _ be friends  _ someday _ .”

John shuffled over to lean against the bed. “Short story long, I suppose so.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said, more as a place holder than anything, because he couldn’t think of anything substantial. It was too early in the morning and too confusing. 

John continued to survey the room. Paul watched idly as his eyes went from side to side, scanning, taking in every detail of Paul’s life that was illustrated by the way he kept his closet door open just so, and the way the curtain wasn’t drawn at all, and the way paper and books were strewn along the top of his desk. 

His desk. John’s gaze fixed on that. There was a book lying there, its edges well worn, and its paper creased from attention. It caught his eye as the thing that had, perhaps, been touched the most, save for the doorknob. 

Just as John pushed himself up to search the desk further, Paul remembered that he’d left the journal lying out in the open last night. He knew he shouldn’t have – he knew he should have put it away, either in the desk drawer or on the shelf. But he’d been far too tired. 

He flew with incredible speed and dexterity to reach the desk before John did. It was far from a success; his efforts just lead to him stumbling against John’s back, pushing him forward. This obvious distress only urged John on to find out what exactly Paul was so protective over. 

“Jesus,” he laughed, “what are you hiding up there?”

He hadn’t been the one to write in the journal (well, technically, he had, but technically, he hadn’t, at the same time), but he still felt that suffocating protectiveness over it, as if it were his own privacy he was keeping. In the life that he now lead, the secrets and emotions of the Paul before him were effectively his own.

John flipped through some pages in the middle of the book, grinning wickedly. “Aw, ‘as little Paul got a diary?” he crooned, as if to a young child. He chuckled fiendishly, closing his eyes, and said, in a high, affected voice, “Dear Diary, today Timmy was mean to me and teacher gave me a check minus on homework; mummy’ll be so mad.”

Paul fumed.  “You  prick.  Just give  me that .”  He reached to wrench it out of John’s hands, but he only twisted away from him and held it out of reach. 

“What?” he teased. “Worried I’ll read what you actually wrote about your tormented childhood?”

When he spoke, his voice was much more threatening than he thought it could have been. “I didn’t write a fucking thing, Lennon. Just give it to me.”

Threatening for him was just a pinprick to John, however, who shook with excitement. “O-oh, now I’m really curious. Let’s just see what you’ve got ‘ere.”

He bit his cheek as he flipped to one of entries in the beginning of the book. “Ah, here’s a nice long one. Really had to vent, now, didn’t you?” He spared Paul a fleeting glance, ignoring the look of wide panic in his eyes, before reading aloud. “ _ They won’t tell me why. I knew she was sick, but nobody said how bad, and they won’t tell us what it was .  _ . . ” 

John trailed off, paling  as his eyes moved swiftly from the left to the right.  He stared at the page, reading through the lines rapidly, and frowning almost as if he’d stumbled upon a bad smell. 

Paul knew which part he’d read. He read what Paul had written just after his mum’s death. Slight details were different from this account and the one Paul remembered; for one, he’d known it was cancer, since information had been more easily accessible to him than it had been to . . . the other him. But the raw emotions were the same; this, right then, hurt as much as it would have at any time, in any decade. 

John looked up to Paul, helpless. His expression was utterly lost. “God, Paulie,” he said softly. “I thought – I mean, I didn’t know – I mean, shit.”

Paul didn’t feel tears threaten to spill, as he feared he might, but his voice was tight when he said, as levelly as he could, “Just get out, yeah?”

“Paul, listen - ”

But Paul  had to get  away from him . He lifted himself up from  the  floor  and  turned, collapsing back on  his  bed in defeat,  his eyes  closed tightly.  He tried to even his breathing to stop the rise of emotion – of loss, of grief, of immense anger, and a bit of betrayal , though he really should have expected no better from someone like John. 

He heard John shuffle forward, closer to the bed. Paul flinched when he felt a hand touch gently against his shoulder. Perhaps it was supposed to be comforting.  “I didn’t know - ”

Several things passed through his mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to say any of them. 

“Please,” he managed. “Please, leave.”

~

John let out a breath  heavily laden with shame  he hadn’t realized he’d held once he closed shut the door of the McCartney residence behind him. He began walking in a direction – whether it was the right one, he wasn’t sure – and cursed himself a thousand times over with the heat of a thousand suns. 

He didn’t realize how far he’d walked when he heard tires skidding; he’d reached an intersection without even knowing it. He hurried across the road back onto the sidewalk, waving at the driver apologetically with a hand that still clutched Paul’s diary. 

One he was safe on the sidewalk, he looked up at the hand that was still raised to wave, and froze. 

_ Shit _ . 

* * *

Here it is, folks! I like to think of this as the beginning of the middle, and I've got all through to the beginning of the end roughly sketched out. Just some warning, though; the fall semester's coming up in a couple of weeks, so I'll probably be unable to write as quickly. But, as always, thanks for reading, and I'd love your feedback!

 

 


	10. What Dreams May Come

It wasn’t often that Paul had the urge to clean. Usually, he kept his spaces relatively tidy, so there was seldom any massive buildup of disorder. However, as he prepared a stew for dinner, he could not get his mind off of the haphazard state of his room. 

With the pot on the stove to cook slowly, he made his way up the stairs, intent on preserving order in any way he could.  If the only place in his life he had control over was his bedroom, then so be it. 

He gathered his small pile of dirty laundry and it to the bin downstairs to do later. He made his bed, straightened up his nightstand, and cleaned the trash and scraps of paper from his desk. 

The cleaning was therapeutic work. After the previous day’s encounter and subsequent emotional outpour in the solitude of his room, Paul had been irritable and  tightly strung  all day at work. Tidying up was just the menial but rewarding task to clear his mind and calm him. 

With yesterday in mind, he resolved to always keep anything important or sensitive in the desk drawer, which he would then lock. That included the journal and, especially, his messily written list of objectives. 

Pulling the drawer open, he held said paper in his hands. Hardly anything applied anymore. He’d changed things, probably irreversibly altering all courses of events. He’d told George more than he should have. He’d spoken to too many people. 

Having the paper was just a liability, tempting fate. He really ought to destroy it somehow.

Simply throwing it away was out of the question; he imagined too many scenarios in which some unsuspecting visitor was (for some reason) in the prime location to spot it in the garbage and decided to give it a read. It was a ridiculous notion ,  but  it  preyed  incessantly  upon his mind. 

He folded it nicely and slipped it back into the drawer; he would have to decide how to properly dispose of it after he finished his cleaning.

He reached for the journal on the back corner of his desk, to place it with the sheet of paper in the lockable drawer, but was surprised when his hand just met the cool varnish of the wood. 

Glancing up, Paul looked around for the journal.  He very clearly remembered placing it there when he last looked through it. And propriety would suggest that John had replaced it close to where he found it, right?  Why would it not be on the desk?

As much as he would have preferred not to think of the embarrassment of the previous day, he recalled the scene carefully. John had grabbed the journal, held it away from him, and then read it aloud. He’d set it back on the desk, hadn’t he?

Paul paled when he remembered that, no, he had  _ not _  seen John set it back. He’d turned away to hide his face from John, preventing him from seeing whatever expression betrayed his inner upset. 

Taking a deep breath, Paul searched around the room. Perhaps John had set it down somewhere other than the desk; he’d left in such a hurry, it wouldn’t be unreasonable. 

But it  wasn’t anywhere on his bookshelf, which was where he checked first. It was in no other drawer of his desk, nor was it on his nightstand, on his dresser, or anywhere on the floor. 

In a frenzied state of stress, he bounded down the stairs, nearly falling when he reached the bottom step. He looked around the living room, which was all that  sat  between the staircase and the front door; only there could John have, realizing that he hadn’t placed the journal back on the desk, decided to leave  set it down.

But he hadn’t. A thorough search of the shelves, bookcase, coffee table, and television stand was fruitless. It was nowhere in the house.

John had taken it. 

~

_ My tears are  _ _ fallin _ _ ’ ‘cause you’ve taken her away _  . . . 

John tilted his head towards the radio in the corner of the room. It was playing something new that he didn’t know. It must have just been released, he assumed, and it was pretty good. 

_ And though it really hurts me so, there’s something that I gotta say . . . _

But it was short. They were all short, all the good ones ; wouldn’t get air time if they were too long. They  didn’t last long enough to fully distract him. Before he knew it, the host was announcing,  _ Well, there it is, folks: the new single by Bobby  _ _ Vee _ _ , ‘Take Good Care of my Baby’ _ . 

What followed was a discussion with some producer or other of some other radio show who had something unimportant or redundant to say that John couldn’t care less about , though he really tried to.  He really wished he could just listen and tune everything else out; namely, the book that lay closed in front of him, but he couldn’t. His eyes kept drifting back. 

It was tantalizing. The dark green cover was old and the spine was well-creased; Paul had owned the thing for years before he started to  write  in it,  he  could tell.  It had probably been a gift.  Without even opening it, John saw that some pages towards the back had been ripped out, which he imagined resulted from early attempts to use the journal for something like sketches or writing that ultimately fell through. 

His fingers itched to open it.  It would just be  the first page, to start with,  to  see what sparked his habit of keeping a diary. He nearly  _ needed  _ to know what had started the habit of divulging personal turmoil to the blank page. If he knew, he could just imagine how enlightening it would be.  Curiosity fought against his knowledge that such prying would be quite  unwelcome . 

_ You’ve already got it,  _ part of him said. _  There’s no point in having it and not reading it.  _

_ But having it’s bad enough,  _ another argued. _  You’ll get into more trouble with him if you read it. He’ll hate you more than he already does.  _

Another song came on the radio. He allowed himself to be distracted by it for a short period of time, almost remembering the words once it ended, but the green cover once again caught his attention. It was like a trap. 

Very quickly, so as to avoid the notice of that voice that preached morality and respect for privacy, he flipped open the diary to its first page. He closed his eyes  and took a breath in.

He wanted so badly to read it, just as he wanted to close it and shove it away . This conflict lead to a compromise of sorts . He let his fingers slide over the page – it was smooth, save for a line or so near the top, where he could feel the indentation from the pen or pencil or whatever he’d used to write with. This was a short entry. It wouldn’t be too revealing if he read it. 

_ It’s so short, it’s hardly even worth it.  _

_ So, what could be the harm? _

He opened his eyes and glanced down at the page. 

As if acting on its own accord, his other hand quickly shut the cover and slid it back, away from him on the table. 

John leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. 

~

When the hands of the clock were at the seven on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, Jim McCartney came home to find his eldest son sitting casually on an armchair in the living room with one leg tossed over the side. His mother would have told him to sit properly, but Jim saw no harm in it. 

The back of the chair was facing him, only letting him see the end of his son’s leg and shoes and one of his elbows. He knew it was Paul because Mike could never have sit still through the front door opening and closing ; he never got as distracted as Paul did . 

The boy didn’t move as Jim neared the chair. He rested a heavy hand on the back of it, peering over to see if his son was sleepin g,  which  could  explain his lack of motion. 

Instead, he  had a book propped in his lap, and he was reading intently. Jim wasn’t a very intellectual man – he left those matters to his wife – but he could tell, just from one glance at the lines, character indications, and archaic diction that the book was an old play. 

Jim found a spot across from his son on the old sofa and watched for a few moments as Paul read through the scene, mouthing the words as he went along. 

He waited for Paul to notice him, but after about ten minutes, he knew his son was either too engrossed in reading to pay him any mind or didn’t want to bother. 

“What’s that you’re  readin ’, son?” he asked. 

Paul continued to read until he finished the line or the  verse  or  the  paragraph – was it even written in paragraphs? Jim didn’t know – before looking up, just briefly, and raising the book to his father, showing the title. 

Jim nodded. “Ah,” he said as Paul went back to reading. “Your mother’s book. What’s troubling you, lad?”

With a vaguely confused look on his face, Paul raised his nose out of the book and tilted his head at his father. “What do you mean?”

“That book,” Jim replied. “It’s  _ Hamlet _ . You read it when  somethin’s  heavy on your mind. So what’s  botherin ’ you?”

A brief expression of understanding played on his features before the bewildered look returned. “Do I?” he said quietly to himself. Jim hardly heard. “Mum annotated it,” he said, turning the book around and showing him the scribbled notes. “That’s what I was reading.”

"Yes, son, I know,” Jim said with a kindly exasperated tone. “You still only read it when there’s  somethin ’ wrong that you need t’ think about.”

Paul looked conflicted. He frowned, glancing back down at the book, and seemed to choose his next words carefully. “How different do you think you’d be,” he said slowly, not quite looking at him, “if you grew up in the nineteen – no, the eighteen, uh eighties. The eighteen eighties. What would you have been like?”

Jim reared his head back, looking off to the side as he processed his son’s odd question. “What kind of question is that?” he asked. “I’ve no idea, son. This place was a lot  diff’rent , then. I’d  prob’ly  be out of a job, or workin’ the docks or the rail.”

“That’s not what I meant. Would you still be . . . you? Would you be the same person?”  Jim could tell that the question was hardly all that was bothering him.

He was saved from answering by the ringing of the telephone cutting sharply into the contemplative silence from the table beside the sofa. Groaning, Jim leaned over to pick up the receiver. 

“McCartney residence.”

From the other end came a young voice. “Oh, Mr McCartney? It’s George. I’ve called to speak to Paul?”

Jim looked to his son sharply, still rather confused by the odd question he’d asked. “Just a moment,” he said, pulling the phone away from his ear. 

He stood, holding it out to Paul, who reached out to take it. “It’s your friend,” he said, and left to take a shower. 

~

Paul put the receiver to his ear. “Geo?”

“Hey, mate,” George’s voice came through, easy and relaxed. Paul had feared that something had happened – he didn’t often get calls from George unless it happened to be the middle of the night and George got those rare urges to speak to someone, so he was slightly worried. “Got a quick question for you.”

Very mildly taken aback, Paul said, “Shoot.”

“Do you play bass guitar?”

“Bass guitar?” he parroted. 

“Yeah, bass. You worked at a music shop, right? They’d have had basses there. Did you ever play one?” 

Paul scratched the back of his neck.  “'S not too much fun to play a bass by yourself,” he said, wondering.  “Why?”

A sigh came over the line. “Oh, no reason.”

~

There were moments where Paul could manage to forget everything bad that had ever happened in his life. When he was laughing with George or enjoying a particularly well-cooked meal (usually with George as well, when he ate dinner at the Harrisons’), he didn’t have to dwell on all of the difficult, unpleasant, disappointing or embarrassing things that had happened throughout his lifetime.

Then, he’d happen to see something. Perhaps he would see a woman walking in the street, arms laden with paper bags from the shops, filled to the brim to save paper; she’d drop a small thing, perhaps an orange, without noticing, and keep walking. It would remind him of the first smart phone he’d ever had, when he was fourteen. It had fallen out of his pocket on his way to school and by the time he’d noticed, he was twenty paces away. Once he’d retraced his steps and found it, the screen was shattered. 

He’d only had it for three days at the time. He and his parents had saved for months to be able to afford it, and it was with a shameful slope to his shoulders that he’d trudged home that day, hoping his parents wouldn’t ask about it. 

That had been disappointing and embarrassing. It wasn’t the best thing to remember when you were taking a leisurely walk home from work. 

But it was better than the other day, when it had been rather sunny, and he was in a good mood after a not-quite-as-boring-as-usual day at  McGinty’s . Then, he saw a boy, maybe around ten or twelve, walking his dog, a little brown and white terrier, both enjoying the afternoon sunlight, when he was painfully reminded of his own childhood dog, who’d been hit by a car. 

Once it was brought back into his mind, something like that was hard to forget. 

That’s the way it had been with his mother. At first, he was devastated. He stayed that way for about a year; it was why he’d had so few friends in school. For so long, he’d closed himself off in grief. 

After a while, he’d gotten over it. Every so often, a family member would mention something that would reopen the old wound, but each time, it healed faster. 

That was what happened at the beginning of this fiasco  – the renewed pain of his mother’s death . Of course, it was a good deal worse for him  than usual , since it was a compound worry on top of everything else, and he’d had those few moments to hope that he would actually see his mum again. But after a couple of weeks, he was forgetting about the pain. 

Now, as he replayed the scene with John and the journal over again in his mind, like a stuck VHS tape that he couldn’t pause, he not only felt the grief that came along with thinking of her; he felt disappointment, because he’d let himself hope that John was better than that. He’d felt anger, because he allowed himself to be fooled by his charm. And he’d felt embarrassment – a testament to the regard he had for John, no matter how hard he tried to erase it – that he had found the journal in the first place. 

It’s been said that you dream most often of the things that were on your mind before you fall asleep. That would most likely explain what happened that night, Paul figured. 

As he lay in bed, a few hours after George had asked him that arbitrary question, he fumed at the memory of John. He saw him there, as real as if it were still happening, just a few feet away from him, picking at his desk. It must have been this lingering thought that had followed him to sleep. 

~

Ever since he found himself in 1961, Paul had not been able to remember his dreams. He remembered this one. 

It was the sort of dream that came from a memory, taking its basal concept and twisting it to feed his fancies or his anxieties. He used to have them when he went to school; he would get into arguments with other lads and, hours later, come up with the perfect snide remark to one of their insults. He'd dream about speaking those biting words to them, since he was  unable to actually do so. He’d dream of changing what happened. 

This dream, though, left him, among other things, uncertain. He wasn’t sure if it fanned the flames of his wishes or his fears. 

_ It began with Paul sitting on his bed, alert. He remembered noting how tightly his fist was clenched at his side; looking down, the knuckles were white as he gripped a bit of the fabric of the sheets.  _

_ “What’s in this, then,  _ Paulie _?” _

_ He looked up at the sound of the voice. It was a musical voice, one that left him wondering whether he’d heard it at all, or just imagined it.  _

_ The speaker was grinning at him. That's what he saw first, that grin; it sent a shiver of  _ _ indiscernible _ _  emotion down his spine. From the grin his  _ _ gaze _ _  wandered to the sharp nose and almond-shaped eyes, then to the mop of auburn hair.  _

_ He repeated in his mind the nickname,  _ Paulie. Paulie. Paulie. _  Nobody had called him that since his mother passed.  _

_ Once his mind got over the wonder of hearing the name again from such an unfamiliar voice, he looked into the eyes of the speaker. In them, he saw wicked humor and ill intention married with insatiable, alluring curiosity. They were the kind of eyes he could fall in love with _ _ ; _ _  dangerous eyes.  _

_ They were the eyes of John Lennon.  _

_ “That’s nothing,” Paul heard himself say, distantly, without actually knowing what it was. He felt like he wasn’t really there to hear himself say it – it wasn’t loud enough to have come from his own mouth, but he still saw from his own eyes, heard from his own ears. Perhaps it was simply his mind that was detached.  _

_ “If it were nothing,” John mused with a glance down at the object he was holding and a smug raise of his eyebrows, “then I  _ _ s’ppose _ _  you’d not mind me  _ _ havin _ _ ’ a look, yeah?” _

_ Paul’s eyes traveled across John’s shoulder and down his arm to see what was held in his hands. He vaguely recognized it as a book, but knew, in that clairvoyant way one has in dreams, that it was supposed to be his journal, though it didn’t look at all the same.  _

_ “It’s jus’ a book,” he shrugged.  _

_ “I didn’t know a book was nothing,” John remarked. “Does that mean that every library’s jus’ empty space, a vacuum?” _

_ “Uh, yeah,” Paul agreed. Some part of his mind told him that this was a credible explanation. _

_ “I don’t think so.” _

_ John flipped open the book, and an unexpected wave of panic flooded over Paul; it forcibly propelled him from the bed, pushing him towards John. He felt as though he were held aloft in midair for just a moment, before the sensation of falling seemed to tug his insides towards his back, and he held out his arms to brace himself for the fall.  _

_ In that moment, he realized he must have leapt forward to stop John. The fleeting sensation of déjà vu that accompanied that action went largely unnoticed. _

_ He had not exactly taken the book away, but he had stopped John from reading it. In fact, it lay several feet away, on the floor, having fallen out of John’s grasp when Paul collided with him and knocked him to the floor. Paul had been able to brace himself for the fall, but John, who had not expected such an attack, was left lying on his back, staring into Paul’s face with surprise and alarm. He was gasping for the wind that had been knocked out of him.  _

_ “Paul,” he said, still rather breathless, his eyes searching for something.  _

_ It made him realize with a blush the position they were in: John lay on his back, while Paul was propped up on his hands, which were positioned on either side of John’s head.  _

_ Even in his dream, a sense of propriety overtook him, and he felt that this was a horribly inappropriate position to be in with John. He was a man, first off _ _  (which Paul hardly minded, but which he figured John did) _ _ , and probably didn’t appreciate this breach of personal space. Furthermore, Paul had just been terribly rude, reaching to knock something out of his hands. His manners had escaped him.  _

_ “I’m sorry,” he said, pushing himself back so he could get up off the floor, hoping to offer John a conciliatory hand as an apology.  _

_ That same wicked joy flashed again behind John’s eyes, and he smirked, reaching up to grab Paul’s forearms before he could raise himself. The forceful grip threw him off his center of balance, and he fell back onto John, now chest-to-chest, impossibly closer. Alarm bells began to ring in his ears.  _

_ “No, you don’t,” cut in John’s voice through the cacophony.  _

_ The man below him raised his knee between Paul’s legs very slowly. Paul was flustered and had no idea what John was doing; why did he not want to get up? The floor couldn’t be that comfortable.  _

_ The bent leg wrapped around one of Paul’s, and John’s entire body twisted to the side, using his leg as leverage to flip them over. It was now Paul’s turn to gasp for breath.  _

_ “What are you doing?” he asked in oblivious confusion.  _

_ John chuckled. “Nothing but what you want me to do. _ _  Right? _ _ ” _

_ He closed his eyes. At that moment, he no longer viewed the scene from his own perspective; he was a fly on the wall, a camera on a tripod, filming the scene from an onlooker’s perspective.  _

_ What he saw was even more shocking than he’d thought: John leaned forward, propped up on his elbows as he brought his hands in to thread his fingers through Paul’s hair (a sensation which he very much felt, despite the out-of-body vantage point). His shoulders were scrunched as he lowered his head towards Paul’s, the defined lines of his shoulder blades making sharp creases in his shirt.  _

_ If or when John’s lips met Paul’s, he couldn’t tell, for at that moment, the room began to blur, at first slowly then with surprising speed, and the dream was over.  _

Paul bolted awake, his heart beating anxiously. He thought a great many things about the dream. 

It was that same sort, a replay of an earlier experience, but this time, he couldn’t tell if his mind chose to present this particular picture to fulfill his fantasy or fester his anxiety. He hoped it was the latter. 

That seemed increasingly unlikely, though, as he though back on the dream itself. What he mostly had to be anxious about was his missing journal – but that had played a relatively small part in the dream itself. It was hardly there, after a few moments. That was, unfortunately, not the source of the dream. 

He wanted to be repulsed by the intimate moment his brain had concocted. He wanted to blanch with disgust, to wrinkle his nose and turn away from its unsavory character, but he couldn’t. 

Though he knew that John had stolen his journal and he should hate him for it; though John had done nothing but make adjusting to life in the time of his grandparents exponentially more difficult, the dream had left a flush on his cheeks. His skin shone with the fine gleam of sweat and his lungs burned as though he’d run a mile; he could not deny that he had been aroused. 

* * *

Well, that's that, the tenth chapter! What a nice number. 

 

I probably won't be able to update next weekend; I might get around to it by Monday or Tuesday night. But after that, classes will start, and with it, I'll have much less time, so don't be surprised if chapters now come every two weeks, instead of every week. Thanks for reading and please let me know what's on your minds!

 


	11. Go Thee to a Nunnery

The shop’s radio was on one of the worst stations Paul had ever had the misfortune of hearing. From what he could tell, it sounded like American gospel (though he hadn’t  ever  heard  or listened to  much of that sort of thing, and was only guessing), or at least it was trying to be, and the result was little more than grating discordance. 

He leaned over the counter to twist the knob, hoping to find something that didn’t make his ears weep. 

The slightest touch gave him static. He wasn’t used to tuning old radios; he’d had absolutely no experience with such a thing, in fact. He twisted it some more, hoping to find something, but with limited success. 

He grumbled in frustration, settling just to turn the volume down, so that the static was not so annoying. 

Just as he prepared to fish his lunch, a probably flattened sandwich of just ham and cheese on wheat, out of the jacket that he’d hung on the coatrack, the phone on the other side of the counter rang. He reached over to answer it. 

“ McGinty’s  Hardware Store , ”  he answered. 

Paul leaned against the counter and twisted the wire on the phone as he waited for a response. 

“Paul? Hey, Paul, it’s Ivan.”

The voice wasn’t one that he could immediately recognize over the phone, but the name brought to mind the slightly younger boy who’d caused him so much trouble before. 

“Oh, hello,” he said unenthusiastically. “I didn’t know you had this number, Ivan.”

A chuckle. “You’re  forgettin ’ lots o’ things recently, ain’t you?”

Paul rubbed his temple with his free hand. “It - it’s old age, son,” he played off. “Senility.”

“Remind me later to have you committed, then,” Ivan chuckled. 

“Hey, respect your elders, yeah? Whatever happened to filial piety?” He  tsked  loudly. “So what’s goin’ on?”

“When’s your shift end?”

Paul glanced at the clock. “In about seven hours,” he said, his tone reflecting his confusion. “At six. I know I told you that before, didn’t I?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess you did.” There was some commotion on the other side of the line that made Paul crease his brows; there was another voice saying something, he knew, but it sounded like Ivan had his hand over the receiver. “ _ Hush a mo’ _ ,” Paul could distinguish faintly. “Uh, when’s your lunch break, then?”

“Noon.”

“That’s great. Great. Er, you wouldn’t mind  walkin ’ over to th at  chip shop down a ways, would you?”

Paul shrugged, though he realized Ivan wasn’t there to see it. “Guess not. You want to meet up or  somethin ’?”

There was a pause. “Yeah, that’s it. I got nothin’ t’do and everyone else’s busy. You know how it is.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “You’re  payin ’,” he said. 

Ivan was more than happy to agree. “Gear,” he said. “See ya, mate.”

Before he heard the click of the other end telling him that Ivan had hung up, there were more muffled words, but only briefly. Paul wondered if he’d been entirely truthful about everybody else being busy. 

Maybe he just has a sibling, he rationalized. Not everybody had to be hiding something all the time. 

~

Paul flipped the ‘open’ sign and locked the shop at noon after taking the sandwich out of his jacket pocket and taking a quick bite. He was hungry, and even if he was on his way to get something to eat, he wouldn’t let a perfectly good sandwich go to waste. 

He arrived at the place not five minutes later, chewing the last of his sandwich quickly, before Ivan could spot him and notice he’d already eaten something. He was afraid it might make him less inclined to pay for Paul’s food, which simply wouldn’t do, since he wasn’t carrying much money on him, even by sixties standards. 

The chip shop was tiny; he saw the entire establishment (though it was really only as established as a rolling stone) through the front window. There was only one old woman behind the counter and little else; Ivan wasn’t in there. He also wasn’t on the bench right outside of the shop, so Paul assumed he hadn’t arrived yet. 

He sat down on the bench, crossed his legs at the ankles, and watched as the city passed him by in their cars, which still struck him as being charmingly Hollywood in  their  retrograde style, and busses, which were more or less the same. He wished Ivan would hurry; he didn’t have forever to eat lunch. 

Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the exact person he didn’t want to see. 

He felt that catch of breath at the top of his throat and the sudden quickening of his  heart rate  as he watched the figure in the distance. 

Ambling down the walk with his arms shoved into the pockets of his impossibly tight trousers was John, looking like someone trying very hard to be casual. Paul noticed that he looked around, almost suspiciously, far too  often  to simply be taking a walk. He was looking for something.

Paul didn’t want him to see him, but he was sitting right in his path. Trying not to move too quickly, which would certainly draw his eye, Paul set his chin on his chest to hide his face, and turned his body ever so slightly away from the oncoming nuisance. He prayed that John would simply pass him by. 

He didn’t want to confront John. Of course, he wanted to get the journal back, and had originally thought of finding him somewhere to demand its return. But after the troubling dream he’d had two nights ago, he couldn’t bear the thought of facing him. He feared that he would reduce into a blubbering mess – and in front of John Lennon, of all people, such a thing would be a great insult to his dignity. He wouldn’t allow it. 

That thought just lead his mind to the dream once more. The projector that played it in his memory, as perfectly captured as a film, simply wouldn’t shut off, though Paul tried desperately  to  make it. 

As the footsteps came within earshot, Paul’s heart began to beat more quickly. He kept track of the speed, hoping it wouldn’t slow as the steps became louder. 

But they did. He was stopping. 

With his head bent down, Paul could only see the bottoms of his trousers and his shoes, but he heart his name clear enough. 

“Paul,” John said in a tone he’d never heard from him before.

It wasn’t as cockily confident as it usually was. It didn’t carry with it any swagger, pride, or humor. It was just a name, stated ambiguously so as to allow for further greeting, or to accept being ignored. It struck Paul as being rather vulnerable. 

He didn’t yet look up. Tersely, he replied, “Yes?” because ignoring him would most likely do no good.

“D’you mind if I,” he began awkwardly, gesturing to the empty space beside Paul on the bench, “uh, if I sit down?”

Letting his eyes slowly travel up John’s form, Paul rested his gaze on his face. He raised one eyebrow sardonically. “Would it matter either way?”

John nodded, resigned, acknowledging his earlier poor manners of imposing greatly upon Paul without being particularly sorry for them, but understanding the other man’s feelings. He sat down.

“I’m waiting for someone,” Paul supplied, perhaps as a deterrent. He wasn’t sure. 

“No, you’re not,” he said, shifting in a vain effort to make himself comfortable. “The Ivan thing was a red herring.”

Keeping his eyes on him, Paul noticed that he was wearing just a thin jumper on his upper body on account of the heat. Paul himself always brought a light jacket, in case of rain, and because it had nice large pockets. Moving on from the jumper, he noticed something clasped in John’s hands. 

“I suppose I’ve got  somethin ’ to return to you,” John said, following his gaze and lifting the green journal.

The sight of John holding the journal brought two events to mind; the one that actually occurred was an afterthought to his troubling dream. Paul tried to hide the embarrassment that accompanied the thought.

He might have known that this was the purpose for the visit; he might have guessed it, if he hadn’t immediately figured that John had buggered off with his book with impunity and read it at will, with no intention of returning it, and no thought as to how Paul would feel. He hadn’t expected John to do the . . . nice thing. 

_ Because the nice thing would have been not to take it in the first place, _  he thought. 

“It wasn’t exactly up for loan,” Paul replied shortly. 

John’s eyebrows came together in worry and apology. “It wasn’t on purpose, honest,” he said in what sounded like a sincere tone. “After - well, after everything, I left in such a hurry. I didn’t know I still had it.”

Paul snatched it out of his hands quickly. John made no move to pull it back. 

“Please, don’t be mad,” John asked, as though it were not far too late. “I didn’t read  anythin ’.”

Even with the journal safely returned, Paul felt terribly vulnerable. He crossed his arms over the book and held it against his chest. His shoulders were tense and he was bent somewhat forward, as if he very much wanted to tuck his knees to his chest, as well. It was a defensive posture.

John tried to find Paul’s eyes, but he kept them downcast. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” he said, “writing down your thoughts, really. Just in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.”

And why should he? He shouldn’t care about what John Lennon thought of him and what he did. He shouldn’t care if John had read his writing at all; he shouldn’t feel so expose, because there should have been nothing of which he was ashamed. And even though there was, he shouldn’t be so angry that John of all people was the one to make him feel this way. What should be, however, is seldom what is. 

“I write stuff too, y’know,” he added, “so it’d be a bit hypocritical, wouldn't it?”

Scoffing, Paul said, “You keep a diary, and it’s supposed to make me feel better about you reading mine?”

John’s expression grew even more morose; Paul could feel it without even looking. “No, I don’t write like that.” He looked down and shook his head, running one nail of his thumb underneath the other in a nervous tick. “You could say mine’s worse, in a way.” He winced at how it sounded. “You know what I mean by worse. I write poems.”

Paul looked up at that, his nose twitching in what may have looked like disgust, but was really only surprise. The expression faded soon. “Yeah?” he said, more as a place holder, a filling for empty space, than real interest. 

“Like songs without music.” That painted a more appropriate picture in Paul’s mind; he could imagine John, the tough rock and roller more easily than he could imagine  _ John _ , the tortured poet.

His lip pulled tight, as if only a single muscle in his face wanted him to smile. He shifted his grip around the journal and said, “I’m the opposite, really. No good at words, but I can do the music.”

John seemed too happy to have gotten a real response out of him. “Well, that’s  somethin ’,” he said, almost in triumph. “Odd pair we’d make.”

The thought of them being a  _ pair  _ lead not to the implied  _ duo _ , in the Simon and Garfunkel sense, but to the completely inappropriate  _ couple _ , which very nearly brought a tint of red to his cheeks. He looked sidelong at John. 

They sat in silence for a few moments. It’s almost comfortable – that is, when compared to the previous levels of tension. John fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, put it in his mouth, and brought a lighter to it. 

Paul followed the motion of his hands, then watched his lips as he took the first drag. John held the thing between two fingers and offered it to him. 

“Want one?”

It was a natural response to wrinkle his nose in disgust. “No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

Almost incredulously, John huffed. “You’re a square.”

“Oh, how American of me,” Paul feigned regret and rolled his eyes.  _ I’m just not too keen on dying from lung cancer.  _

Paul continued to watch his companion breath in deeply, hold it, and then release the breath of smoke. Watching his face, Paul tried not to think of that wretched dream; it was a hopeless endeavor, and he had to look away. After a while, John spoke up. “It was your mum, wasn’t it?”

He narrowed his eyes, guarded. “Ivan tell you that, too? Or did you actually keep reading my journal?”

John shook his head. “No, no. It jus’ - jus’ seemed like that’s what it was.” He paused, waiting for Paul’s confirmation, but when none came, he took it as confirmation enough. “How did it happen?”

Paul opened his mouth, the word on his lips but his voice failing him. 

“You don’t have to tell me. I’m sorry.”

He took a deep breath. “Cancer,” he said at last. He wasn’t sure what possessed him to tell John.

John nodded as if in understanding, which Paul found to be quite disingenuous, until he said, “Lost my mum, too, in a car accident. Four years ago. I was seventeen.”

Paul blinked. John had said it with such little emotion, as though he said the words without really meaning them, even if they were true. Paul wished he could have done such a thing. 

“Yeah?” This time, the word held some emotion. It was a slight sort of sympathy. “Sorry ‘bout that.” He tried not to sound too pitying, because he knew he would have hated it if John pulled something like that. 

Chuckling dryly, John leaned to the side and nudged Paul’s shoulder with his own. “Don’t apologize, son. ‘S not like you did it.” Fixing him with a look of exaggerated scrutiny, he said, “Unless . . . that’s what you’ve been  hidin ’ all along?”

Paul shifted his arms, uncrossing them and holding the journal with one hand. He found this to be awkward, so he crossed them again. “Uh, sorry to disappoint, but no.”

He  hadn’t known anything about John’s home life. He had no idea that his mother, too, was gone, just like Paul’s own. Looking at the man beside him as he finished off the smoke, it struck him how similar their teenage years might have been, despite the obvious differences in decade. The passing of a mother was something that changed a person, and this shared agony made Paul feel much closer to John than a foot away. 

All at once, he realized how fond his train of thought was getting. He  steeled  himself from that encroaching kindness; it was too soon. 

Paul was, generally, forgiving. He did not often hold grudges that lasted longer than a few days; in most cases, carrying on with anger for someone expended more effort than it was worth, so it was inefficient. 

But this was a different story. The cause of his ire was not some petty squabble at work or at home. This was John Lennon seeking him out to conduct repeated offenses to his privacy and his solitude. He was presumptuous and understood the concept of boundaries as a tripwire to be stepped over, instead of a wall meant to block. 

“That doesn’t make it okay,” Paul said, trying to erase any residual sympathy from his voice. “What you did, it’s not all right just like that.”

John pursed his lips regretfully. “I know,” he said, sounding very much like he would have liked to say something else. He sounded like a teenager refraining from snapping at his parents. 

Paul wasn’t sure what to say next. Had he gotten his point across adequately with that simple statement? 

“D’you think you could forgive me?” John pleaded. “I had no idea what was in the diary – ”

“It’s not a diary,” Paul clenches his teeth, “and you should never have found out in the first place,” he maintained. John was about to say something, but feeling uncharacteristically bold, Paul cut him off. “I can’t hide that my mum’s dead. That’s just another thing you could weasel out of Ivan – it’s no secret. But the way you just came in and helped yourself to something so personal, something private, without any invitation . . .” He took a deep breath, trying to find words harsh enough to make his point. “It’s not just disrespectful, rude, insulting and simply hurtful – ” 

“Paul, you’ve got to understand, I didn’t mean any harm,” John interjected with that same supplicating tone. 

“Not only was it all of those things,” he continued slowly, as though John hadn’t interrupted at all, “it told me that you aren’t someone that I can . . .” Again, there was a momentary loss for words. “I dunno, that I can trust. I can’t trust you, and someone that I can’t trust can’t be any real friend. And if you’re no real friend, then there’s really no point in us going on like we are – or like you think we are.”

John’s mouth fell open. “You mean,” he stammered, “you mean you don’t want to be friends.” It sounded pathetically juvenile. The word “friends”  completely  fit with what he meant. 

Some part of Paul thought his next outburst was too much, that it was more hurtful than it needed to be, but he’d held back weeks worth of irritation and vulnerability behind mild quips and short remarks. It had built up. 

“I never did!” He almost shouted. “The whole time I’ve known you, it’s been you  pryin ’ into my life and me backing away. That’s not a friendship; it’s not even acquaintance. It’s like – like – like a fly buzzing ‘round your ears! You’re a nuisance, you’re annoying, and I know you do it on purpose, so don’t bother apologizing once it finally gets you into trouble!”

Paul hadn’t realized that, as he seethed in anger, he’d stood and flared down at John. The latter still sat, paralyzed on the bench, looking at him with some nameless expression in his eyes. It had hurt, regret, and quite a lot of something Paul couldn’t quite put his finger on.

A bell at some church perhaps a mile or two away chimed twelve. Paul would be late getting back to work. 

“From now on, just leave me alone,” he said, spinning on his heel and stalking back towards the shop, his journal clenched tightly in his hands. 

~

“You’ve been gloomy ever since this whole ordeal began, but this has reached new levels of dour,” George said in an exasperated tone to Paul. “It’s getting to be pretty  annoyin ’.”

Paul sent a glare to his friend. “Well, I’m sorry I’m no ray of sunshine for you.”

The two of them were sitting on a bench in the Harrisons’ garden, watching the sky turn orange with the sunset. George had his guitar, but Paul hadn’t felt in the mood for music. 

There was a sigh. “What’s gotten you so depressed lately?”

Paul looked away, unsure if he wanted to get into it with George. It all felt too . . . private, too emotional, to talk about. It was too close to home to be comfortable divulging. 

But this was George. If Paul couldn’t talk to him, then he couldn’t talk to anyone. 

“A while ago,” he began. “A few years ago, Mum got me a book to write things down in. I used it for reminders and such – like a calendar, so I wouldn’t forget things. It was when I was a teenager, and I didn’t want to talk to my parents about anything,” he explained. “She thought it would help me sort through my emotions.”

It was obvious that George didn’t know where this anecdote was going. 

“I only used it for that once she died. I’m not sure if I really needed to write it down to deal with it, or if the fact that she gave it to me somehow . . .” he paused a moment and took a breath. “If it somehow made it hurt a bit less. I dunno.”

“You’ve just been  missin ’ your mum?” George asked. 

Paul shook his head. “No, no, that was just background information.” He laughed dryly. “You know how  concise  I am.”

“Oh, do I. Go on.”

“Well, the first thing I really wrote about was her death. Then, I kept it as more of a journal – I'd write short bits here and there of things I thought might be worth remembering in the future. Or, that’s what I think I did. You see, I never had a journal like that back home.”

George grinned, realizing something. “So, the Paul from here kept a diary? That’s pretty handy.”

Paul chuckled. “Yeah, it was. I’d be even more lost without it. But,” he said, bringing George back to the importance of the story, which he hadn’t gotten to yet, “there’s more about it.”

“Of course there is.”

“Shut it. Anyway, last weekend, John just came up to my door and knocked – and it was bloody early! I had to let ‘ im  in, so he wouldn’t wake the house.”

George nodded with a skeptical ‘uh-huh’. “I think I see where this is goin’.”

He pursed his lips grimly. “Yep,” he said. “He came up to my room and read it. He went right to that first entry ‘bout me mum and just read it like the entitled bastard he is.”

He nodded in sympathy. It was a rather rude thing to do, George knew. Everyone knew. But Paul had more to worry over than most. “You know,” he said, “John probably didn’t have any idea what was in there. He probably just thought it was an agenda or  somethin ’ harmless like that.”

Paul narrowed his eyes. “Well, it wasn’t a’ right? And he should have known better than to just go  diggin ’ through someone’s things, ‘specially when he wasn’t even there under invitation in the first place.”

George said, “Hey, I’m not sayin’ that what he did wasn’t wrong. I’m just sayin’ that he’s an idiot, like most of his lot, and much more can’t be expected of him.”

Huffing, Paul said, “But that’s not all, Geo. He took it!”

This took him aback. “He what?”

“He walked off with it once I told him to leave.”

“Well, then,” George said, “that’s a bit different. He just ran off with it, then? Did you try to stop ‘ im ?”

Paul shook his head darkly. “Didn’t know he’d done it until he was gone.”

George whistled. 

“He found me, day before yesterday,” Paul went on, “and gave it back. He pretended he was sorry for it all. Said that taking it was an accident.”

“And was it?”

He thought a moment. “It probably was,” he conceded. “But that’s beside the point. He read it in the first place. And I just blew up at ‘ im  and left.”

He couldn’t tell George of the second layer of his conflict. There was no way he could tell a bloke like him that he’d had a dream about John kissing him and running his hands through his hair; he couldn’t say anything about the traitorous crush that left its seed while he was sleeping.

“You had a fight with John, and now you’re depressed.” George nodded to himself. “That’s quite telling.”

Paul crossed his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “What are you implying?”

George held his hands up, as if in surrender. “Just that it seemed like you were starting to warm up to him, is all, before he read your diary.”

He refrained from snapping ‘it’s not a diary’. “You’re just on his side because you want him to like you enough to let you in the band.”

George looked affronted. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not taking any ‘side’. I’m just pointing out how you come across.”

Paul let his arms drop and looked up at George again. He sighed heavily and rubbed his nose. “God, I’m sorry,” he breathed. “It’s just gotten me so  . . .  infuriated. He wants to be friends and, until then, he wouldn’t stop hounding me.”

“But he’s stopped now?”

“Well, it’s only been a couple of days, but I did finally shout at him,” Paul said. “And it felt good, too, at the time. I said everything that I’d wanted to say since I met him.” He brought his hand down again and ran his finger along the seam of his pants idly. “But I just feel terrible about it now. I’m never that cruel.”

George cocked his head. “What did you say to him?”

“Just - Christ, I can’t even remember now,” he said. “I’d never been so blunt with anybody. More than blunt, even. I know I could have left it long before I did, but I just wanted to stop him, once and fort all, and put an end to all his prying.” He looked at George with a sad sort of humor. “I feel terribly like the mafia for sayin’ this, but he was  messin ’ about where he didn’t belong. I felt like I had to stop him before he knew too much.”

“I think you did,” said George, who had less compunction than Paul about saying rude things to people to get the point across. 

“But I kicked him over and over, once he was already on the ground. I wasn’t me.”

George strummed a quick riff softly with an absent mind as he regarded Paul. “It’s eating you from the inside,” he said. “Maybe you need to apologize.” At Paul’s wrinkled nose, he added, “for your own benefit.”

Paul just sighed once more and leaned back against the bench, shaking his head. 

“Or, at least,” he amended, “let John apologize.”

Shooting George one final sideward glance, Paul fixed his eyes on where he knew the sun was setting behind the clouds. 

* * *

Well, guys, I'm back. SO sorry for the long absence - classes started and I've only just sorted my life out, so I hope updates will be fairly regular from now on. But, like always, please leave a comment to let me know what you thought! Until next time <3

 


	12. New Beginnings

The crowd was quite obviously displeased with the night’s performance. The band was, as well, to be perfectly honest.  It was an off night, to say the least. 

The drummer was lacking, as usual, but that came to nobody’s surprise. Stuart was competent at best, which wasn’t out of the ordinary, either. The real body of the band, comprising the sole singer and guitarist, however, failed to meet the audience’s expectations. 

They had been told that John Lennon was a good singer. Or, at least, if he couldn’t sing conventionally well, he sang with emotion, and that was enough to ensnare the crowd. What they saw was little more than a bored, careless recital of something they very well could have listened to on record , which was undoubtedly a better way to spend their time. 

“Well, that was absolute shit,” Stu remarked as they dragged their equipment off of the stage and into the back room. He didn’t sound too heartbroken , since he cared little for music to begin with . 

“I thought it was all right,” Stanley, the drummer of the hour, replied optimistically. 

“Of course you would.”

Stu set his bass into its case and let it sit on the floor by his feet. He cared little for the instrument; if he had his way, he’d trade it in for some canvases and paints, or perhaps a new camera,  if it was worth that much,  but when he was friends and flat mates with John, he learned that having his way was no frequent occurrence. 

The man in question followed them into the room expressionlessly. Stu recognized  his face  as the  one  John wore when he was either distracted or very tired. His guess was that both plagued him tonight. 

Taking a glance to make sure that Stan wasn’t nosing about where the two would sooner he stayed away, Stu approached John slowly, like a lion tamer would. Dealing with John was an art in itself. 

“Wasn’t our best out there, was it?” he tested, keeping an eye on John’s face. 

His expression changed only minutely. He didn’t look at Stu; his gaze was fixed  somewhere or  nowhere in the distance, but he raised his eyebrows to acknowledge that he heard. “Uh,” he said  _ intelligently _ , “I  s’ppose  so.”

Stu reached around him and reli e ved him of his guitar, propping it up against an adjacent wall. More quietly, he probed, “What’s up with you? Fought with your aunt again?”

John curled his lip  downward . “No, no, she’s fine. She’s very well.”

Stu looked away and shrugged, since John was obviously not in the mood to talk. It had been a long night, and they were all tired; whatever bothered John could continue to bother him until Stu was rested enough to care a bit more. 

Because he was making such a noise banging about with the cymbals, Stu decided to help Stan put away his kit. He hoped Stan would be gone sooner rather than later; he was an all right lad to  hang around  with, but he was too chatty, too up for light conversation all the time. Stu only said what needed to be said, if it absolutely needed saying, and Stan simply wasn’t his sort of person. Besides, he was no musician (this was an afterthought to Stu since, granted, he was no musician either).

The door swung open and Ivan Vaughan entered. His entrances were always loud announcements, rather than simple arrivals, so Stu hardly had to send a glance to the door to know who it was. Furthermore, he opened his mouth soon enough. 

“’Ey, Johnny,” he greeted good-naturedly, and then added, “Stu.” He nodded. 

“Hello,” Stu replied mildly, only to be polite. Ivan was another of the sort who just liked to talk too much. 

John liked him, though, which was perhaps why Stu didn’t particularly  _ dislike _  him, despite his initial reservations. John was the sort, like him, who didn’t need to fill every silence with words to have a good time, but unlike him, he was up to talking almost any time. 

Just not  _ this _  time. 

From what he could gather, John was not his usual self in response to Ivan, since the younger defended, “I didn’t do nothin’; don’t look at me like that!”

Stu sighed. “Been like that all day, Ivan. Nothing personal.”

Ivan huffed. He shuffled his feet, considering whether to broach the subject he’d come in to raise in the first place, now that he saw John’s ill demeanor. “Well, I’m not here for nothin’ personal, neither.”

John lit a smoke and looked at Ivan while he took a drag, waiting blandly for him to continue. 

“I caught word of a – of a – ” he cast his eye over to Stan, who was preoccupied with the metal legs of his drums and obviously not listening. Stu knew  then  what he’d heard. “A drummer, one up for grabs.”

John shrugged wordlessly. His eyes strayed from Ivan. 

Scoffing, he complained, “You’ve been  houndin ’ me for weeks! Now that I found  somethin ’, you won’t even listen to me. I run all over for you, you know  tha ’, right? ‘Cause you’re a decent lad. But a bit of gratitude might be nice.”

His tone was rising to irritable levels; Stuart’s ears were pleading him to intervene. “Ivan,” he said, “I told you, John’s jus’ pissy. I’m sure he appreciates what you do.”

“Well, if that’s true,” Ivan huffed, “then he’ll meet the guy next week at the Bootleggers’.”

John spoke up. “I’m busy,” he excused. 

Rearing his head back, Ivan said, “With what? Your moping?”

He took another drag and held it for a few seconds, before lazily letting the smoke escape his lips. “Just busy.”

“Yeah, well,” Ivan crossed his arms, “this lad’s good. Real good, and if you don’t nab ‘ im , then someone else will, and you’ll be stuck with – ” he cut himself off before Stan could overhear an unpleasant characterization. 

“We’ll manage,” he said nonchalantly. 

“John,” Stu said tentatively. He’d brought up the subject enough to make him blue in the face, so he didn’t want to raise his ire further, but he felt it needed to be said once more.  “You really should be lookin’ for replacements.” He went on when he realized, with relief, that John wasn’t growing outwardly irritated. “At least for bass.”

He nodded in response. “And I got some feelers out, a’right? Jus’ wait a bit.”

“Not to pester,” he added tentatively, “but I’ve not got forever . . .”

“ Fuckin ’ hell,” John snapped with the first display of emotion of the night, “would you shut up about fucking Germany? It’ll still be there once we’ve got someone.”

Ivan was the sort of kid who had an expressive face. When his eyebrows rose, his whole body shifted along with it; it was enough to draw Stu’s attention. “I know what’s got you, you  arse ,” he grinned with his revelation. “I ain’t gonna be your personal secretary without  pickin ’ up on some things. You’re bothered with McCartney.”

At the name, Stu’s ears peaked with interest. “McCartney? You mean Paul, whose book you kept lookin’ at all week?”

If aggressive smoking was something that a man could do, John certainly accomplished it. He sent a glare to the both of them but otherwise ignored the accusations, looking away indignantly. 

“What happened with him?” Stu directed at Ivan. 

He hummed. “Dunno, exactly,” he said, “but John met up with ‘ im  yesterday at lunch to talk about  somethin ’. Had me call ‘ im  out of work, and said that he had to think it was me he was goin’ to see, since he wouldn’t see John.”

“Ahh,” Stu said in a bit more understanding. “So it wasn’t a fight with Mimi after all.”

“Shut it, you old bats,” John said. “It’s none of your business what went on.”

Stu tilted his head. “I dunno,” he mused. “It’s gotten you all out of sorts, and that’s gotten the band out of sorts, so I think it could be our business.”

John groaned. “I’ve got it handled,” he said, though Stu doubted the veracity of his words. “So just get off my case, will you?”

~

John did not have it handled. 

He was fairly good at handling angry people; he was often one himself, after all. But each person had a different type of anger and different ways of dealing with it, he knew. 

When his uncle was mad, which wasn’t a frequent thing and even less frequently directed at John, the thing to do was find a good song and just sit in his company while he thought it over, which did not take long. His aunt, however, angered more easily,  and it was  mostly  because of John. He learned very early on that the way to handle her was to leave her alone and make himself as scarce as possible until her short fuse cooled. 

Stu was much the same as Aunt Mimi, in terms of how to handle his anger, but his ire was infinitely more difficult to detect – at least, for John. Stu hid his emotions until he snapped, which wasn’t the most efficient way to communicate. 

Paul was a different story. 

For one thing, John did not know him well enough to handle his emotions. They’d only had a handful of encounters, and while it was true that for most of them, Paul was irritated and moody, John’s primary concern had been finding out the reason  _ why _ , not how he could fix it. 

But he had reached the point where Paul’s irritation had grown so great that it hindered his endeavor. 

Furthermore, he simply felt guilty. 

He had no idea how to get Paul to listen to and accept his apology, and his own feeling of remorse for his actions perplexed him just as much. He wasn’t the sort to regret things; if he didn’t want to do something, he wouldn’t do it; if he did, he would do it and not care what anyone else thought about it. Something about this particular fight made him acknowledge that the trouble was his fault, and he made a mistake. 

Now, he had certainly made mistakes before, but he never regretted them. They were learning experiences, and he could always handle their negative repercussions. This time, though, he wasn’t sure  _ how  _ to handle them. 

He had to get to Paul somehow. He had to make amends. 

~

About a  week later,  Paul examined himself in the bathroom mirror. He wasn’t sure what to make of what he saw. 

Healthier food and overall discomfort with his situation made his face ever-so-slightly thinner. He hadn’t been eating as much as he used to; every time he felt hungry, he would go to the kitchen, and undoubtedly find something to eat. However, he never felt like it was within his right to eat it. What if that particular piece of food was only for his brother or father? What if he ate something that sixties Paul didn’t like, and his family grew suspicious?  He didn’t want to cross any unseen boundaries.

His hair was a bit longer than it had been since he arrived nearly one month ago. He’d always worn it with a simple style, long enough that he could see that it waved, but not too  long that he needed to do more than comb his fingers through it to make it presentable. It was getting a bit unkempt about the ears, and touched the collar of his shirt in the back. Perhaps it was time to get it cut. 

“Hey, George?” he called when he heard some movement in his room. 

The boy in question must have been messing with something of Paul’s, because he called back a distracted, “Uh, yeah?” 

“I need to ask you  somethin ’,” Paul shouted back when it was obvious that George wasn’t about to come to him. 

“What?”

“Come in ‘ere, will you?”

George barreled down the hall and into the bathroom, slightly out of breath, holding a hand over his cheek and looking at Paul apprehensively. 

He raised an eyebrow. “What was goin’ on back there?”

“Uh - nothing,” he evaded, looking around guiltily. 

Paul crossed his arms, eying the way George held his cheek skeptically. 

“I’m sorry,” he caved under Paul’s scrutiny. “But your E string snapped.” He lowered the hand over his cheek to reveal a bright red abrasion.

Paul looked momentarily surprised; such a trivial thing seemed to bother him a great deal. Sensing how seriously he took the transgression, Paul furrowed his brows and narrowed his eyes into a stern expression. “George! How could you do something like that?”

Apologetically and regretfully, George hurried to repeat, “I’m sorry! But I wasn’t  messin ’ around with it, honest. I just tuned it up a bit, and it was too low, so I tightened it, and it snapped.”

Huffing out a breath of air, Paul turned back to the mirror to look preoccupied with his hair.  “I can’t believe you.”

“Paul, I’m sorry,” he tried again. 

It was difficult to maintain the pretense of anger. Paul let out a laugh. “I’m just  havin ’ you on,” he said, turning around and grinning. “It’s okay. It was  prob’ly  old anyway.”

George deflated. “Jesus, mate,” he said. “You had me worried, there.”

“You didn’t honestly think I’d be mad, did you?”

George was quiet. 

Cocking his head to the side, Paul asked, “I’m not usually that . . . Temperamental, am I?”

“No, no!” he hastened to assure him. “I just - I know your guitar means a lot to you, and it wasn’t cheap, and you don’t have too much money to spend on maintenance.”

Paul went back to combing through his hair. “It’s just a string,” he said. “Maybe if you bashed it up ‘ gainst  a wall, I’d be a bit angry.”

George moved to sit on the closed seat of the toilet while he waited for Paul to finish pruning his hair. “What did you want me in here for, then?”

Paul hummed for a moment. “I was just wondering - ” He sounded very preoccupied with brushing his hair back perfectly, but George could hardly see any difference. “It just occurred to me that I probably used to have quite different hair, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. Now that you mention it, you did,” he answered. 

George couldn’t easily observe things about his friends in terms of their physical appearance. When he looked at someone, he saw, more or less, whatever he wanted to see – he saw their personality and impression reflected in their physicality. Paul, for example, was a perfectly fine-looking bloke, to George, because he knew him to be a very good friend and decent lad, though he knew that if he really looked, objectively, he’d see imperfections in the symmetry of his nose or the slant of his eyes. He also always thought of Paul being rather tall, though he knew that, by measurement, he was shorter than George; the fact that George looked up to him for his skill and character made him larger in his eyes. 

He had hardly noticed when Paul hadn’t combed his hair the same way. 

“You could have said  somethin ’,” Paul muttered as he continued to mess with his hair. “What did it look like?”

George tilted his head, trying to remember. “Uh,” he thought for a moment, trying to recall. “It was kind of curled.”

Paul sighed exasperatedly. He quickly brushed all of his hair back and pulled one segment from the top, twisting it around his finger and releasing it into a comically emphasized cowlick. “You mean like this?”

George rolled his eyes. “Don't be a prick. You know what I mean.”

Paul mussed his hair again. “No, I actually don’t,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘curled’. I never paid enough attention to what people wore these days. You need to be more specific.”

“You mean you don’t know how we wear our hair at all?”

“I mean, vaguely. But nothing more than that.”

Paul could picture the quintessential nineteen-fifties haircuts, all grease and pompadours, but he couldn’t imagine himself wearing one. He wouldn’t even know how to fix his hair into such an unnatural style. 

“It’s like Elvis, yeah?”

Paul locked eyes with George through the reflection. “Like I said. Vaguely.”

George simply shrugged. “Fine, then. Hand over your comb.”

He blinked. “I didn’t mean - ”

“Yeah, yeah, call it even for snapping that string.” his friend dismissed, looking around the bathroom cabinets for the hair gel he knew Paul had. “And I’m sick of your  complainin ’.”

Paul reddened at the thought of being so concerned over his appearance – but George had seen right through him. 

Once he began to accept (to  _ really  _ accept, not just realize) that he was stuck in the nineteen sixties for an indefinite period, he had made conscious efforts to act like he belonged. He still didn’t feel like he did, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to, but he did want fewer constant reminders of how out-of-place he was. One such effort was to change his hair, but try as he might all afternoon, he could not figure out how to style it. 

It made him feel terribly dependent on George but nonetheless grateful for his help. 

As George began to comb through Paul’s hair, he had to admit that his bout of self-consciousness was not entirely for purposes of blending in. Part of it had to do with where he planned to be in an hour. 

“This is how you had it most days, if I remember right,” George said once he’d finished. Paul was astonished by how quickly and efficiently his practiced hand could work. 

“That’s . . .” He struggled to find a word. “Different.”

It made his face look thinner and more angular, having the hair brushed up like that. It was odd, too, not to feel anything on his forehead, and the gel felt slightly cold against his scalp. He wasn’t sure if he liked it. But, then, he hadn’t grown up seeing blokes do their hair this way, so he wasn’t the best judge of it. He trusted George, though, so he could not complain. 

“'Course it is. Now, you don’t look like some uptight louse.” George crossed his arms and looked at Paul, scrutinizing.  “Well, that’s not true, but you look a  _ bit _  less like an uptight louse.”

“Thanks,” Paul rolled his eyes.

He grinned. “Anytime. D’you think we might get goin’, now? I don’t fancy  hearin ’ you worry over  bein ’ late.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Paul muttered as he grabbed his wallet from the counter and stuffed it into his pocket. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Right,” George nodded dubiously. 

Paul hurried, as if George’s mention of nervous had summoned them in him. He realized that he had merely been suppressing his growing anxiety. 

He shot George a quick glance which simultaneously begged him to say something reassuring and warned him to keep quiet. Paul both wanted to get on with the ordeal and put it off indefinitely; the thought of confronting John Lennon seemed to do that to him. 

~

Music echoed off of the Cavern’s brick walls and wooden tables. There weren’t yet many people around to absorb the tinny background from the radio, so it struck Paul and George as being eerily solitary inside the pub. 

They shared a glance. Paul told him silently,  _ See, we wouldn’t have been late. _

George replied with a roll of his eyes. 

A few people hung around some of the corner tables, of course. They were the regulars, the men who spent more waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours here instead of home in their beds. They were the Norm Petersons who skipped work to hang at the bar or in their small groups and waste their lives away by the bottle. Paul only shot them half a glance before moving on to the rest of the room. 

The drum kit was already set up on the stage, but nobody sat behind it. It was early, but not too early for the band to have arrived, right?

“Uh, let’s just sit down over there,” Paul said, pointing to a small table by the wall. George shrugged and followed him. 

Paul wanted to find a place where John wouldn’t see him. It was a ridiculous hope, because his whole reason for being here was to confront him, but Paul was a ridiculous man. There wouldn’t be any harm in putting it off a bit longer. 

John may not even be here yet, he rationed. No need standing around in anticipation yet. 

“Stop  bouncin ’ your leg,” George ordered. “It’s  shakin ’ the table.”

“Sorry,” he said quickly, placing a hand on his knee as if holding his leg down would stop the nerves. It wasn’t working. 

George shook his head and looked at the table. Paul could tell he had something to say and was trying to find the perfect words to reveal just enough but not too much of the contents of his mind. 

He looked up at Paul, took in a breath, and paused. This made Paul even more anxious; what was so difficult that George couldn’t simply say it?

He tried again. “You were never so nervous about  talkin ’ to people before.”

Paul looked down. He felt betrayed by his transparency. He couldn’t hide the shameful blush that rose to his cheeks at George’s words, which had brought to mind all of his previous interactions with the enigma that was John Lennon – both real and imagined. Or, rather, dreamed. Especially dreamed. 

“I, uh,” he started, but didn’t know what to say. 

“I don’t mean to say there’s a problem with  bein ’ shy,” George hurried to clarify. “ Somethin’s  bound to be different.”

“No,” Paul shook his head. “I’m not – I'm not shy. Not usually.”

George nodded in pretend understanding. “Oh. So . . . is it just him, then?”

Paul put his chin on his fist and averted his eyes, which was enough of a confirmation. He didn’t know what George could possibly be thinking. What did he assume about the source of his anticipation? If he weren’t over fifty years out of his time, Paul would have guessed that George assumed exactly what Paul feared was the truth – a truth that he didn’t want to admit to himself. 

“It’s not - ” he stuttered, “I’m not – he's not -”

He hoped George would drop the topic, but his next question was telling enough that he would not. “He’s not what, Paul?”

Mustering the courage to look into his friend’s prying stare, Paul affirmed, “He’s nothing, George.”

Leaning back into his chair, George didn’t drop Paul’s eyes, and he felt that he would be a coward if he looked away. George crossed his arms and waited for Paul’s inevitable clumsy defense. 

“There's nothing,” he insisted. “I’m  just  not used to apologizing. There’s nothing more to it.”

Distantly, a door slid open and then closed, but in his concentration on reading George, Paul didn’t notice. It took George’s sideward glance at the new wave of noise and laughter to bring it to Paul’s attention. When he followed George’s gaze, he blanched. 

Looking down and screwing his eyes shut, Paul took a deep breath and hoped irrationally that he could go unnoticed. His  heart rate  was audible and he felt like George would see the pulse of the arteries in his neck. Nervously, he scratched his cheek and shot a quick glance back at the group that had emerged from the back room. 

George kicked his leg. “Go, mate,” he said quietly. Paul gulped and nodded. 

~

"I don’t feel that we’ll do as bad as last week,” Stu ventured cautiously as he, John, and Stan filed out of the back room to finish setting up the stage. 

Stan nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” he said. 

John merely shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, leaning against the closest table to the stage to mess with his guitar. 

He didn’t want to perform tonight. He wanted to go back to his flat and sleep; he hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and every time that he was tired, he wasn’t in a position to go home and try. Once he did reach his bed and turn out the lights, he could only lay awake, staring at a ceiling he couldn’t see for the darkness. Stu surely noticed the bags underneath his eyes. 

There weren’t many people here yet; there was still about an hour until the set was due to start, and this week, they were scheduled earlier than most people frequented pubs on Friday night. Part of that comforted John; without a large audience, there would be fewer people in front of whom he could embarrass himself.

He didn’t want to tell Stu and draw his ire, but John was quite out of it tonight, as he had been for the past two weeks. While he was well aware of the cause, he was quite powerless to fix his mood. 

Being powerless was no pleasant feeling for anyone. He, in particular, felt its damage, because of his natural inclination to lead. The reality he faced, however, was that Paul McCartney held the power to take any next steps in mending their relationship – if he was so inclined, that is. John had the terrible feeling that he wasn’t, and that with their most recent meeting, he had seen his last of that odd lad. 

An awkward clearing of the throat came from somewhere behind him. Lazily, John turned to look, and started. 

“Oh,” he said in surprise. “Paul.”

There stood the very person on whom John had dwelled for so many nights. He could hardly believe that he was ther e – really, physically there -   and not  some  tortured memory. His shoulders were tensely squared, and shoved deep inside his pockets, his hands formed fists. He did not look like he wanted to be here, which took away some of the relief John had initially felt upon seeing him. 

“I, uh,” he continued, since Paul obviously was not supposed to speak first, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” 

Paul glanced down at the floor. John looked at his eyes, the hazel color of which he could no longer see.  John found himself  staring at the dark lashes that framed those eyes  and it struck him  just how effeminate – but oddly, not in the off-putting, androgynous way – Paul’s features really were.  He was actually  rather handsome .

Part of him reeled back in surprise and confusion at that particular thought, but he pushed it aside when Paul opened his mouth. 

“Yes, well, I didn’t expect to be here.”

John blinked and tilted his head. “What changed your mind, then?”

“It was actually, er,” he mused, scratching his neck and shuffling from foot to foot, “when I considered that . . . uh, when I realized that . . . “ he trailed off and had to gather himself. John was surprised by his lack of composition. “No, it was George.”

John raised his eyebrows. “He certainly keeps you in line.” He wondered exactly what Paul meant by George changing his mind. “Was it only George?”

“It was mostly George.”

“Right.” 

There was a pause between both of them. John heard movement and shuffling behind him – Stan and Stu. Stu whispered something to the drummer that sounded like an impetus to shove off, and before long, it was just him and Paul standing still beside the table. John sat down, an unspoken invitation for Paul to follow suit, and open himself for a full conversation. 

Paul sat down, then shifted his legs and set his elbows on the table, but decided that it wasn’t the most comfortable position, so he leaned back instead. “It was a bit rude of me, how I acted,” he explained, not meeting John’s eyes. “Well, more than rude, I suppose. You apologize, and I wouldn’t even listen.”

John tried to catch his gaze, but it didn’t work because Paul just wouldn’t look him in the eye. “No, Paul,” he said tentatively, “what I did, it was . . .”

“It was bad, you’re right,” he agreed. “But you apologized, and I’m not usually one to hold a grudge.”

“You’re not?” he scoffed. “Is it just me, then? Am I special?”

Paul laughed gently. “Yeah, you’re a special case. Grudges usually aren’t worth the effort.”

Grinning, John finally caught Paul’s eyes. “So, has this meant that I am, or that you thought I was and I’m not?”

“Oh, you’re definitely not worth it,” he quickly looked away and then back again. John found his eyes mesmerizing. 

“I really am sorry, though,” John said sincerely. “It was never something I should have done. I just didn’t think.”

“No, well, I was a bit too harsh, I suppose.” Those eyes, they were so widely open when they actually did look up at him. John couldn’t look away. “I can’t say it’s all right just because it was an honest mistake, but I can see that you . . . that you didn’t do it to hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t do something like that.” John had to look away from Paul for a moment if he wanted to blink. He chuckled in an attempt at lightening the situation. “Not until I know you better.”

Paul nodded, the corner of his lip curling up. “Yes, I’m sure being friends with you would be a dangerous thing.”

“Does this mean that you’re willing to be friends?” he ventured. 

The shrug Paul gave was an ambiguous reaction. “Just like holding grudges, it would be too much energy to try and stop you, I guess. Being so rude is exhausting, you know?”

“Oh, yeah, I know,” John leaned back. “I’m rude on an hourly basis. On a minutely basis. It’s why I sleep so much, just ask Stu.”

John watched Paul’s eyes as they found their way up to the stage behind him, where Stu and the drummer were pretending to set up while they gave the two a moment alone. At the mention of Stu, John could just see gears turning in Paul’s mind, but he hadn’t a clue what they were thinking. 

“Say,” he said, quietly, “Why d id  you want to be friends so badly, anyway?”

John paused. Well, it was more like he froze. He usually had a quick answer to anything and everything, but this caught him off guard. Why exactly did he bother Paul so much? Why was he so curious about Paul in the first place?

“I don’t,” he said, almost defensively. “Well, I don’t  _ not  _ want to be friends. I mean, you’re a new face, and you seem all right. And I’ve heard you on guitar, figured you may be worth  havin ’ around.”

Paul rolled his eyes. 

“You’d be willing to put all this-” he gestured inclusively at the table, as if the empty space embodied all of the tension that still passed unsaid between them. “-behind us?”

Paul cut his eyes to the side very narrowly, considering his next words. After a few moments, he said, “If you really do want to put it all behind us, then yes, I would.”

John let out a breath. “Great.” He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it to begin with. 

“And I do mean all of it,” he continued, looking surprisingly assertive. “You don’t pry into my life anymore, and you don’t go asking Ivan shit like where I live or where I work like some crazed stalker. You get to know me like a real friend would.”

Paul didn’t look away until John answered with, “I think I can handle that.” They shared a brief smile. 

Behind them, John heard a particular tone resonating from Stu that warned of his rising irritation. He could hardly be surprised; Stu quite obviously could only handle so much of the hopefully temporary drummer. John nervously slid his chair back, beckoning behind him. 

“I should, uh, go up there and help set up,” he excused himself. He needed to intervene before Stu got too worked up to focus tonight. “Maybe you could stick around, have a pint with us after the show? You and Harrison?”

“Sure,” Paul grinned one final time before standing, preparing to make his way back to George.

* * *

It's been a little over two weeks, I know, but I got SUPER sick this weekend and I've been home from class for the past two days :( Bad news for makeup work, good news for having time to do next to nothing! Except finish up these chapters. So, here you go - let me know what you think of it, please! I live off of feedback and cold medicine

 


	13. Manners Maketh Man

Paul and George sat back at their table, both with a beer (Paul’s treat) and a  bowl  of pretzels between them. Paul, who could not sit still, ha rdly sipped  at the drink, while George had long since finished his. 

He kept his eyes off of the stage, though he could hear the band performing. Avoiding being caught watching the band was a ritual now.  He didn’t want George to see him staring at John. He didn’t want John to see him staring at John. He didn’t want to stare at John. It was just something very hard not to do. 

He didn’t miss the knowing glances George shot him every once in a while, but he tried to ignore them. They just made his heart beat faster. 

It was then, staring at John with shaking hands and a fluttering heartbeat, that he had to acknowledge the . . . small crush he had developed. 

He could not deny how relieved he felt having apologized. A weight had lifted from his shoulders when John had smiled at him genuinely just an hour ago. He realized that it had been the first time  John  smiled from true happiness ,  not derived from causing Paul  amusing distress or  displeasure. It had put a stop to his heart that made him clench his jaw and try not to widen his eyes from wonder. 

But it was only physical attraction, he rationalized. He didn’t know John well enough to be attracted to anything beyond that. He was handsome, sure, and had the sort of quick wit that Paul both envied and admired, but that was it. He didn’t know what John was really like. Therefore, he told himself, his feelings were shallow, fleeting, and easily ignored. 

He was wrong on all counts, and deep inside, he knew that, but it was yet another thing he chose to ignore. 

Their gig lasted another hour, during which both Paul and George tapped their feet or fingers in time with the music and made small, irrelevant conversation. 

The music eventually came to a calm conclusion, and Paul watched as Stu and John backed off of the stage, leaving the drummer to stare awkwardly into the crowd for a moment before following them. 

So as not to seem over-eager, Paul didn’t immediately suggest finding them. George was obviously waiting for him to do so, and it gave Paul a measure of satisfaction to know that he was doing the unexpected. 

But perhaps he wasn’t entirely diverging from George’s expectations. He was reluctant to ask, but needed to know. “You’ve never really said. What do you think of John?”  He bit his lip, feeling quite like a  gossiping  schoolgirl. 

George was slightly taken aback by the question; being so blunt wasn’t in Paul’s style. “Well,” he paused, trying to find the answer. It wasn’t something he’d thought of before. “He’s a’right, I s’pose.”

“Okay . . .” Paul invited him to say more. 

“He’s a good player,” he stated obviously. “A bit arrogant. Who isn’t?” 

Paul shrugged in agreement. 

George rested his chin on his fist as he thought longer. “I didn’t like him,” he said, “when you started talking about him at first.”

“Why?”

“Well, you wouldn’t shut up about him,” he chuckled dryly. “No, I know why you didn’t. But it was a bit annoying – he got you so irritated, I didn’t see why you couldn’t just ignore him.”

“Well, I did try,” Paul defended. 

“You did  _ not  _ try. Not seriously.” Paul made a noise of protest, but George continued. “I didn’t have a real reason to dislike ‘ im  – I didn’t know ‘ im . But for the same reason, I had no reason to like him, particularly.”

Paul had to admit that it made sense. “And now . . .?”

“It seems to me,” he said, slowly, “that there’s something . . . off about him.”

Leaning back, slightly surprised, Paul probed, “’Off’ as in, possible murderer? Or ‘off’ as in eats cereal without milk?”

Laughing, George said, “I’m not really sure, yet. He’s not  _ bad _ , as far as I can tell. But there’s something odd about him.”

“I don’t really know what you mean.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” Georges said. “You just see that artistically ideal part of him that stands up on stage and winks at you. I’ve never really mentioned it to you,” he trailed off, trying to find a way to specify the Paul that was instead of the Paul that was before, and he settled on, “recently,  that is,  but I’ll get feelings about people. Whether they’re right or wrong, it’s what I base my impressions off of. And my impression of John wasn’t . . . it wasn’t black or white, you could say. He just seems complicated.”

Paul nodded. “I’ll pretend I know what you mean.”

“He doesn’t seem all bad,” he hesitantly tried to clarify. “Not nearly. But he doesn’t seem all good, either.”

Feeling uncharacteristically protective, Paul posed, “Is  there  anyone  _ entirely _  good?”

George shrugged as if to say,  _ touché.  _ “Possibly. And possibly not. I’d like to think there  is , at any rate.”

Paul took a sip of beer, mainly for the theatrics of it, and tilted his head with a shrug. “I’m not up for this t’night. I ask a simple question and get some philosophical answer that I simply don’t have the willpower to debate.”

George  tsked . “’s your fault for  assumin ’  anythin’s  simple, mate,” he said with a slow, esoteric air. “There are more things in heaven and earth, McCartney, than are dreamed of in your philosophies.”

Humoring him, Paul laughed, “And that’s where you’re  makin ’ your mistake. I don’t  _ have  _ a philosophy. Not tonight, when I’m too busy . . .” He wasn’t sure what exactly he was too busy doing, but George filled in the blank for him. 

“Too busy  swoonin ’ after Lennon, you git,” he accused good-naturedly.

George couldn’t have known just how true his playful jibe was, so Paul tried to ignore it, rather than feel exposed. He was partially successful, judging by the temperature he felt in his cheeks, but George tactfully ignored any change to his complexion. 

“And  speakin ’ of Lennon,” George said with a low whistle, “I’d say you better go see to him, ‘fore he passes out.”

Paul creased his brow. “What?”

He turned in his chair to follow George’s line of sight. There was John, stumbling out from the back room and clutching his nose, where drops of blood trailed through his fingers.  His jaw dropped open in surprise.

Paul almost knocked his chair over in his haste to reach him. 

He must have pushed a few people out of his way, because he vaguely recalled hearing some ‘hey, watch it’s as he passed, but he paid them no mind. Once he reached John, he skidded to a halt, grabbing his shoulders to steady himself. 

“What the fuck happened, John?” He sounded like a worried mother hen. 

A small crowd began to congregate around them. Right next to John stood Stuart, and a bit behind them was the still-unnamed (or, if he ever was named, the long-since-forgotten) drummer, looking quite alarmed. 

It was obvious that there had been a fight. John’s hair was messed and falling into his eyes, one of which was dark and beginning to swell. There was a cut on his cheek, deep enough to draw blood but shallow enough to only sting. The blood dripping from his nose trailed down his arm, but there was some on his chin, and Paul figured he must have gotten a busted lip, as well. 

A larger man, looking perhaps a few years older than John, pushed through the crowd that had gathered around them. He spat at John and Stu through swollen teeth, “You fuckers are such pansies.” Stu backed away from him, eyes wide with alarm. “The poofter couldn’t even get in a good hit. Look at ‘ im , the sod.” He shook his head and grumbled.

While Paul narrowed his eyes into an angry glare at the belligerent man, he noticed a dazed look in his eyes, and assumed that he had drunk more than his share tonight.

Th e  man’s e yes went from Paul to John, then back again. “You’re all bloody disgustin’,” he swore before brushing past Paul and disappearing into the crowd. 

Paul looked at Stu, whose expression gave him very few answers. He decided that time for questions would come later. 

Never the sort to be squeamish around blood (his mother was a nurse, after all, and the neighborhood kids had always come to her when they’d scraped their knees), he wrapped an arm around John’s shoulders to steer him toward the bathrooms. Which were . . . 

“Stuart,” he said in a commanding tone, “where’s the washroom?”

Stu was busy looking skittish, but snapped out of it long enough to point to the left. Paul looked to see a doorway and nodded his thanks to Stu before leading John over there. 

“I can tell you,” John said in a muffled voice, “ tha ’ he looks way worse ‘an me.”

Paul let out a chuckle. “No thanks to you, mate,” he said dryly. “I don’t see him with a black eye an’ broken nose, do I?”

Once they reached the door to the bathroom, Paul pushed the door open with his foot and lead John through the threshold. The doorway wasn’t meant to accommodate two boys standing abreast, and trying to angle them through without letting go of John’s shoulders lead to an awkward predicament. John accidentally kicked the door when it began to swing shut once more, making him curse. 

“’e don’t need a broken nose to look like shit,” John mumbled. 

The bathroom had two stalls and one sink. A wooden stool sat in the corner, having obviously seen better days, but it was probably better to sit on than a toilet. Paul dragged it over to the sink with his foot and dumped John down onto it, letting him lean back against the wall. “Here, use these,” he ordered, gathering napkins from the stack next to the sink and placing them in John’s hands. 

John tilted his head back and pressed the napkins against his nose. 

“No, no, don’t do that,” Paul corrected. John opened his eyes and looked at him incredulously. “Don’t tilt your head back,” he went on, putting a hand on the back of John’s head, right above his neck, and pushing it forward. “That just makes the blood go down your throat, and you’d have to cough it up if you don’t choke on it first.”

John exhaled through his mouth as he followed Paul’s directions. “What a good little nursemaid, you are.”

Paul handed John more napkins once the others had become too soaked with blood to catch any more. “Mum was a nurse.”

John nodded mutely, waiting for the bleeding to stop. 

“Pinch your nose here,” Paul pointed to the place right below the bone. “It should stop in a minute or so.”

While he waited for the nosebleed to stop, Paul ran some of the napkins under cool water. He shot glances to John, taking in his messy clothing and incessantly bouncing leg to conclude that he must still be high on adrenaline and probably didn’t even feel the cut on his cheek yet. 

When John pulled back the napkins for the last time to reveal only the faintest trace of red, Paul pointed over to the trash bin, where John tossed them away. 

He tried to maintain the utmost professionalism as he lowered himself to his knees in front of John, raising one of the wet napkins to his face. He couldn’t force himself to make eye contact as he said, “It may hurt a bit, but it may not.”

“Wonderful bedside manner,” John scoffed. 

“Better than sayin’ it won’t hurt at all when it definitely will,” he shrugged and pressed the napkin gently against John’s cheek. “That all right?”

“Fine,” he said. Paul figured that it probably wouldn’t hurt until another hour had passed, and he was glad to get it taken care of now, rather than later. He began to wipe the blood and bit of dirt away. 

Now that he could see the shape of the wound, he asked, “Was he  wearin ’ a ring or  somethin ’?”

“Think so,” John said absently. He sounded preoccupied with something, and Paul could almost feel his eyes boring into his own, but he didn’t bring himself to see if he was actually looking there. “And he called me a  poofta , the git.”

Paul tried not to flinch. “Is that what the fight was about? That what he called you?”

John’s countenance darkened. “ Somethin ’ like that.”

He’d have to get more information out of Stu. It seemed that John was less than eager to recount exactly what had provoked the fight. 

Tossing that napkin into the trash, Paul got another one to clean around John’s nose. He looked much better, now there wasn’t that large smear of red on his upper lip, but it began obvious then that his lower lip had been busted. 

“This looks pretty nasty,” Paul mused as he wiped around his chin, putting off touching John’s lips as long as he could. 

“Still better than ‘e looks, like I told you.”

Paul fought to keep his hand steady as he found a clean part of the napkin to wipe John’s mouth. He did it gently, so as not to further irritate the skin, and felt his face heat up from the newly realized proximity. He was just so close to John – had he ever been this close before? He could see the creases on his lips, and he was sure, if he looked up, he’d be able to see the different flecks of color in his eyes . 

He had to gingerly cradle John’s face with his other hand to keep him still. Paul tried his hardest only to touch him with his fingertips; the animosity John had for the very notion of being queer rang through Paul’s head like a bell, and he felt very aware of how out-of-place he was, a modern lad in the reserved past.

“You changed your hair,” John said suddenly.  Paul  felt his nerves come alive with anxiety. 

“Well,” he began uneasily, trying to keep an even tone, “I didn’t, technically. This is how I usually wear it.”  _ Or so I’ve been told _ . 

“Don’t get so touchy,” John sighed, waving a hand. “Looks good on you.”

Paul tried not to lean in too close when he felt himself  s way faintly. 

Once he was finished, Paul cleared his throat and stood up, backing away to a safe distance. He handed John one final damp napkin and instructed, “Hold that against your eye while I ask the bartender for some ice. I’ll be back.”

Still not meeting his gaze, Paul hurried from the bathroom and shook himself to calm down. 

~

John was settled at the bar with a mug of warm beer and a towel wrapped around ice cubes pressed against the left side of his face. Paul hoped that it would stop the swelling and discoloration before it got too bad - John really had good eyes, very sharp and acute, and Paul told himself that it was the shame of ruining that perfect almond shape that made him care, instead of the thought that he could be in pain. 

Paul tore his eyes from John’s back to look at Stu, who sat across the table from him. “What exactly happened, Sutcliffe?”

Stu looked up at Paul, his hands clenched into a ball in front of him. He was rigid with tension from the encounter that had happened only half an hour earlier. 

"Jack –  upperclassman from college,  he's been ‘round here a couple of times, seen a few gigs, and always tried to cause a bit of trouble – he walked out and just fell over, right on the sidewalk.”

“What?” Paul asked in alarm. “He didn’t look that bad when he went by.”

“Well,” Stu said slowly, “I suppose  slammin ’ his head against a brick wall must’ve given him a concussion.”

“ _ What?”  _ he said again. “ _ John  _ did that?”

He nodded with pursed lips. “You really don’t want to get on his bad side. You didn’t think John would just let him get away with doin’ that to him, did you?”

“What did that guy even say to him?” He could hardly imagine John doing something like that. “John never struck me as being so . . . sensitive.”

“He isn’t, usually,” Stu agreed. He tapped his fingers anxiously against the table. “But there’s something that gets him . . .”

“Jack came out  callin ’ him a poof,” Paul said, swallowing thickly with discomfort after trying to say it without a pause. “Was that what got him angry?”

Stu laughed. “If you’d known John as long as I have, then you’d know that  callin ’ him queer is the  _ last  _ thing you want to do,” he said lowly. Something about his tone struck Paul as defensive. 

Paul felt his heart sink. He’d entertained a crush – however briefly – on someone who would sooner hospitalize a lad for  _ suggesting  _ homosexuality. He knew it was preposterous to assume that anyone would be tolerant, let alone accepting, of such a ‘deviant’ lifestyle. 

“So, that was it?” he asked. “He called him queer and John just threw him into the wall? Is that all that happened?”

Stu almost nodded. “It was mostly the way he said it,” he answered reluctantly. “There was a bit more.”

Paul waited for him to finish. 

“Well, you see, to be queer, you gotta be queer  _ for  _ someone . . . yeah?” He didn’t look comfortable talking to Paul, of all people, whom he’d met all of twice, about something so personal and taboo. He took a deep breath and shot a glance at John, then looked back to Paul. He spoke very quickly, like he was trying to swallow medicine as fast as possible. “Jack suggested that John and I were  sharing  more than just  a flat, if you know what I mean.  John took just a bit of offense to that.”

Paul raised his eyebrows. His natural inclination was to ask,  _ And were you? _  but common sense told him that such a thing might be a bad idea. 

“Don’t even suggest it,” Stu said sternly, having sensed what Paul didn’t say. 

“Hey, don’t sound so defensive,” he raised his hands in surrender. 

Stu narrowed his eyes. “I’m not gonna bash your head in, McCartney, but you’d better not - “

“Stuart, I’m joking,” Paul diffused. “Just trying to make light of the whole situation.”  They were both quiet for a moment. 

“Right.” 

He shook his head. “I can’t believe that John . . .”

Stuart raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t think he was  _ soft _ , did you?”

“No, no, ‘course not,” Paul excused quickly. “But I just expected him to be more,  er  -”

“You obviously don’t know him at all.”

At that moment, George arrived at the table and put his hand on Paul’s shoulder. “That other guy’s gone home or the hospital. Not sure which, but ‘e had a mate  dragin ’ ‘ im  along,” he announced to both of them, “so  _ just in case you were  _ _ wonderin _ _ ’ _ , which I know you  prob’ly  weren’t, I doubt he’ll die.”

“That’s -  “ Paul  didn’t really know  _ what _  it was. “That’s good, I guess.”

“Does John do this often?” George asked of Stu. 

“Do you mean getting into fights or winning them?  ‘Cause  the answers vary,” Stu said. 

George leaned forward to put his elbows on the table and crossed his arms. Paul got the impression that he was drilling Stu  at some interrogation.  “He gets into a lot of fights he can’t win?”

“Sometimes,” came the answer. “He’s got a short temper.”

George nodded. “Does he ever drag you into any of his fights, like he did tonight?”

Stu leaned back, tilting his head. “He didn’t ‘drag me into his fight’ this time,” he retorted. “Jack’s the one that did that.”

“But are John’s mates typically involved in the fights?” 

Stu shrugged. “Sometimes,” he repeated. 

Paul exhaled exasperatedly. “I’m sorry, Stu,” he excused, before standing and grabbing George’s shirt sleeve. “Geo, a word?”

He pulled George over to the side of the pub, away from Stu or John or anyone else who might hear their conversation. He settled on a corner across from the stage, where one of the overhead lights had gone out, and the only people there were a gang of smokers who wouldn’t give them the time of day. Paul withstood the terrible smell of second-hand smoke and glared at George. 

“What was that?” he demanded. 

George cocked his head and tried to quell a grin that threatened his lips. Paul hated that this somehow amused him. “What  d’you  mean, mate?”

“Don’t play dumb, George,” Paul cautioned. “I know why you’re askin’ those questions. You said earlier that you didn’t really like John.”

George crossed his arms and shifted his weight to his other foot leisurely. “You’re  puttin ’ words in me mouth, you are,” he said. “I didn’t say I don’t like ‘im.”

“You said there was  somethin ’ ‘off’ about him!” Paul accused. 

“And there is,” George replied, not losing any of his confidence. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t like him.”

“It just means that you think he gets into fights left and right and that I shouldn’t be  hangin ’ around him,” he returned. 

George sighed and shook his head. “Paul, you’re readin’ too much into this. I just wanted to know if he was the sort who got into rows or not.”

“Yes, but  _ why _ ?” he pressed. 

“Why do you think?” George lowered his voice and said, quite seriously, “Paul, mate, I’m  tryin ’ to watch out for you.”

“I don’t need you watchin’ out for me. Hell, I’m older than you! I don’t need some big brother.”

George raised a skeptical brow. “You don’t? Mate, you had me  _ do your hair _  today.”

“Okay, that has nothin’ to do with -”

“It just shows how much you  _ don’t  _ know about livin’ here,” he said. “I don’t know how easy you may’ve had it in your twenty-first century, but here, when kids get into fights, a bloody lip and broken nose is actually a pretty good outcome.”

“You’re just being dramatic.”

“Paul, I’m  tryin ’ to get you to see that the way you grew up isn’t the way we all did,” he said quietly. “You’ve told me ‘bout how were as a kid, just  hangin ’ round your house, never goin’ anywhere or getting into any trouble. You were taught that everythin’ was dangerous, but never how to deal with it. But here, when you’re growin’ up, you’re out of your house whenever the sun’s out, usually later, and the folks like it that way. Kids learn to deal with the city and the other kids in it. You never had to.”

“I wasn’t raised in a bubble,” Paul said. “It’s frankly insulting that you would - ”

“Fine, mate,” George turned away. “Don’t listen to me. But John’s the sort who’ll drag you into all his shit. He won’t always win his rows, Paul, and you’ll have to see that it’s not gonna be so nice  hangin ’ round someone who stirs up trouble anywhere he goes.”

Paul watched him leave. He debated calling after him, to apologize for being angry – but he wasn’t really sorry. He wasn’t necessarily proud of how he’d scolded him, since George really was just looking out for him, but he was doing so in vain; Paul wasn’t so delicate that a single fight would break his resolve. George just assumed that he’d had life so much easier in the future; that wasn’t necessarily true, was it? He just had life a bit different. 

It’s not like John was getting into gang fights, Paul reasoned. He’d come to blows with a single person (that he knew of) in the weeks Paul had known him; he wasn’t some sort of short fuse. Right?

George long since gone, Paul debated heading home, since the excitement of the fight had died down. He watched as Stu went over to John, exchange a few words, then left, leaving John sitting at the bar. If they lived together, why didn’t they just leave at the same time?

Paul remembered then that John had invited him and George for a drink after the gig and figured that he may have been waiting for him; it incentivized him to approach John and take the adjacent seat at the bar. 

John saw, out of the corner of his eye, that Paul had arrived, so he snapped his fingers at the bartender and beckoned to Paul, then to the mug that sat in front of him. The bartender hurried to fill it with beer. 

“No, I’m fine,” Paul protested. 

“I’ll buy,” John excused, as though that was the deciding factor. The truth was that Paul wasn’t much of a drinker and never had been, and he’d had two pints already. 

“Really,” he protested weakly, but the bartender had already set the new pint in front of him. 

“Just drink it, will you?” 

Paul sighed and took a small sip. 

John rested the side of his face on his fist and turned his head to look at Paul. He was almost smiling. 

“Harrison head out already?” he asked. 

“Yep,” Paul said. 

“I don’t reckon he likes me,” John mused. “ ’Cause  I didn’t let him into the band.”

Paul raised his eyebrows. “So that’s his issue,” he said, though he knew that probably wasn’t the whole problem. “ Dunno  why you wouldn’t take him, though. You heard him play, right?”

John shrugged. “Heard you play, too. You’re not in the band.”

Paul scoffed. “That doesn’t mean  anythin ’, other than you haven’t even  _ asked  _ me to be in it.”

“If I did ask you, would you?”

“No.”

“Exactly.”

“But Geo would. And he’s better than me.”

John raised his shoulders lazily. “He  prob’ly  can’t sing. I bet you can.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “You have absolutely nothing to base that on,” he dismissed. He didn’t know whether George could sing or not, but that was hardly important. “And, anyway, George plays guitar. You’re the one who sings.”

Another slow shrug. It seemed like the effects of the adrenaline were beginning to weaken. Paul saw how his good eye was half-lidded. 

“Do you play bass?” he asked. 

Paul narrowed his eyes. “George already asked me that,” he said. 

“And I already asked him.”

“What’s so important about playin’ bass? You’ve got Stu for that, haven’t you?”

John laughed. “Stu’s no good for bass,” he shook his head. “Stu’s good for  complainin ’ about gigs and rambling on about  _ Germany _ .”

“Germany?” What an arbitrary thing to fixate on. 

“He wants to live there,” John explained. “Got some  diff’rent  art school he’s  lookin ’ into. I won’t let ‘ im  go until I find us a replacement, though. Can’t have a band with just a singer and a drummer.”

“Well, you’re out of luck here,” Paul said. “I don’t really know the bass.”

“Could you learn?”

“That seems like a lot of work,” he said reluctantly. What he meant was,  _ I’m not going to join your band, so quit asking.  _

John drank the rest of his beer in one quick gulp and turned to face Paul, barely holding the iced rag to his face anymore. 

“You - you should really keep that on, John,” Paul said, feeling uneasy at the way John was looking at him. 

“Nah, I’ll be fine, son,” he dismissed. “It’s already numb.” He lowered it from his face and set it on the bar to dig in his jacket’s pocket. He extracted two smokes and offered one to Paul. “Need a light?”

It still surprised him, somewhat, how much it was taken for granted that everybody smoked. “I don’t smoke while I’m drinking,” he excused. 

John shrugged. “A’right,” he slid back away from the bar and prepared to stand. “We can go outside, then. You didn’t want to drink anyway.”

Paul’s mouth fell open for a moment. He tried to think of something to say. Bashfully, he replied, “I, uh, don’t smoke when I don’t drink, either . . .”

Already standing, John feigned exasperation. He overlooked Paul’s awkward excuse and gestured to the barstool. “Well, I’m already  standin ’. What  d’you  say we just head out now? Stu’s gone, your mate Harrison’s gone, and I have on good authority that the next act is pretty crummy.”

“Oh, um, all right,” Paul agreed, sliding away from the bar.  He followed John to the doors, his heart pounding.  

* * *

Here it is, finally! I've gotten over that pesky cold and I'm back to business. Hope you liked the chapter, and as always, please leave feedback!

In other news, I wanted to let you guys know that I'm on tumblr at the-dog-argos, in case any of yous guys wanted to drop by and say hi. 

 


	14. Force the Moment to its Crisis

John lead the way out of the front doors and into the warm night air. The traffic wasn’t heavy and there were only a few pedestrians on the sidewalks, but the city still hummed with life. John stood by a lamppost and waited for Paul to catch up.  

As he approached John, that constant hum of city life grew suddenly and infinitely louder. Paul turned his head to face that doppler effect of an uproar, squinting into the bright headlights. His heart hammered in his chest as he saw those two yellow eyes approaching and suddenly recalled the last time a car came that close to him on the sidewalk.  

He jumped back with a loud, frightened intake of breath, catching John’s attention. “Paul?” he turned back at the noise just in time to catch him stumbling backwards away from the road. Only, he didn’t just back away; he lost his footing, and John surged forward to grab his shoulders and halt the fall; it didn’t exactly work.  

Paul landed flat on his arse, his hands reaching behind him to break the fall. He felt the shock running through his elbows and shoulders and it knocked the wind out of him. On top of that, his heart was still pounding in his chest. It was the only thing he could hear.  

John had followed him down, landing heavily on his knees beside his fallen friend. He clutched Paul’s shoulders and repeated, “Paul? Paulie, you a’right? Paul?” 

Taking a few deep breaths, Paul realized that his name was being called; he opened his eyes and saw John leaning very close, his eyes – even the one almost swollen shut with the bruise – heavy with concern.  

If Paul’s cheeks weren’t already flushed, they certainly were now. He could hardly believe how intense a reaction he’d had to a simple  _car_. He was never so . . . scared of such commonplace things before . Before . . . well, before a commonplace car actually hit him, that is.  

 _It could have happened again,_ he thought with a rush.  _A car could hit me and I could be gone, just like that._  

Gone? Would he really be gone? 

 _Or maybe I’d be back._  

“What was that, McCartney?” John demanded once more, not letting go of Paul’s shoulders. He had his loose shirt clutched in tight fists, and Paul found that feeling very grounding. If John weren’t there quite literally holding him up, he’d fall flat onto the pavement and perhaps stay there in an existential crisis forever.  

He didn’t  _want_ to go back, he realized. He looked at John with wide eyes and grinned, perhaps from genuine happiness at the revelation, perhaps from relief at  _not_ being smeared into the cement. Again.  

“I - I – I don’t know,” he stammered, still gathering his bearings. “Th - that car.” 

John’s eyebrows came together. “That car, it didn’t come close to the sidewalk,” he explained slowly. 

“It didn’t? It looked like . . .” 

“You just had a bad scare, that’s all,” John reasoned, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. “I didn’t know you were so . . . jumpy.” 

“I’m not,” Paul claimed, pushing himself up off the ground. John gripped his forearms to help him up; he smiled gratefully.  

John tilted his head. “You’ve gone and messed up your perfect hair with that stunt,” he mused, reaching up and catching a strand of Paul’s hair between his fingers, pushing it back.  

Impulsively, Paul reached his hand up to his head to fix it with an “Oh, sorry,” but found that John hadn’t pulled away yet, and knocked his fingers with his own. There was the shock of surprise and both of them pulled their hands back quickly. “Thanks.” 

“No problem, mate,” John said, clearing his throat and backing away. “Let’s get on then, yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

The two of them walked a ways, still brimming with awkwardness from that brief moment. They very close, as the sidewalk wasn’t large, and each time their shoulders brushed (which was suspiciously often, Paul noticed), one of them would let out a chuckle under their breath and play it off as an accident (that’s what it was, right?).  

They reached the bus stop, where John had to wait a quarter of an hour to catch the next run; it was close enough to Paul’s place to walk, to he did not want to bother with the fares.  

“You can just head on,” John said, perched on the back of the bench. “Don’t have to wait for me.” 

“Do you want me to go?” he asked, stretching his legs out along the bench and leaning against the side.  

John shot him a grin. “Nah, you’d probably fall over sideways every time a cab drives by.” 

Paul looked down and shook his head. “I don’t know what came over me,” though he had known very well what happened and why.  

John opened his mouth, undoubtedly to ask any number of prying questions, but looked to the side, and sealed his lips. He shrugged as if to say that it didn’t matter.  

Paul appreciated that John was letting all of his oddities go, if not unnoticed, then unmentioned. He sent him a wordless smile in thanks.  

They remained in amiable silence until the bus arrived, at which point John leapt down from the bench, patted Paul’s knee amicably, and bounded on, but not before shooting him a wink with his good eye.  

Paul grinned all the way home.  

~ 

It was a Monday.  

 _Monday, Monday,_  Paul hummed to himself as he closed the back door to his house and felt the warm and faintly humid late summer air press against his skin. It wasn’t too sunny a day, which was nice, since Paul burned quite easily.  _So good to me._  

Burning. By no means a pyromaniac, Paul had never had the boyish fascination with fire that his brother and friends seemed to share. Sure, it was nice to look at for a second when you have literally nothing else to do, but it came with that unpleasant waxy smell of heat that made Paul’s nose feel clogged.  

 _Monday morning, it was all I’d hoped it could be_ , he continued as he fished his dad’s lighter out of his pocket. They used it for many things – not just the obvious one of smoking, but also starting up the gas stove when it wouldn’t light or melting the ends of shoelaces together when they started to unravel – so it had just been lying around on this fine Monday morning. Paul flicked it on. He observed the flame briefly before using his free hand to pull something else from his pocket – a piece of paper.  

He glanced around compulsively. His dad was at work and Mike had stayed week with some cousins, so nobody was around, and Paul knew that, but since he was doing something that ought not to be observed, he felt eyes watching him, naturally.  

 _Oh, Monday mornin’, Monday mornin’ couldn’t guarantee -_  

The paper was folded neatly to hide the scribbled writing from any prying eyes, but he remembered exactly what it said. Most of it was long since disregarded, and it now only stood to be discovered and blow any progress he’d made to integrate to sixties life completely into the wind. It needed to be gone.  

He held it gingerly by one corner and raised the flame to its edge, watching in grim satisfaction as a physical manifestation of his anxiety withered to ashes.  

 _That Monday_ _evenin_ _’ you would still be here with me._  

He missed newer music sometimes. Of course, ‘newer’ meant little by his standards – but he needed to hear something written after nineteen-fucking-sixty-one for once; he was going mad, having so many songs stuck in his head with no way to actually hear them. Today’s was just one example.  

 _Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day._  

He heard the rusty squeak of hinges as his garden fence swung open. His back was to the gate, so he could not see who had entered; his eyes grew wide and his pulse quickened. Looking hurriedly at the paper still clutched between his fingers, he saw that the fire had sufficiently caught, so he dropped it into the metal trash bin at his feet before spinning around to make some sort of excuse to his visitor.  

“Didn’t figure you’d be in for arson, McCartney,” John Lennon grinned as he leaned casually against the gate, folding his arms over his chest and crossing one leg over the other. Paul scolded himself for noticing that the loose button-up shirt he wore revealed the sharp line of his collarbone.  

Swallowing, he answered, “And I didn’t figure you for breakin’ and enterin’.” He shuffled on his feet and inched away from the rubbish bin. “Well, actually, that’s a lie. I’d figure you for breakin’ and enterin’ in a heartbeat.” 

John shrugged his shoulders and send him a cheeky grin. “I’d hate to disappoint.” 

He sauntered forward. Seeing his face more clearly, Paul noticed, “Your eye’s lookin’ good.” 

John raised an amused brow. “Yeah?” 

“I - I mean,” he corrected, realizing how vague he’d been, “compared to how it looked, er, before, y’know.” 

“Yeah, I know, Paul,” he feigned confusion. “I know what you meant. What did you  _think_ I thought?” 

Paul’s mouth fell open and he gaped like a fish. “I - uh – I – oh, stop it,” he looked down at his feet and crossed his arms protectively over himself to hide his discomfort. “What are you doin’ here?” 

John looked around and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Oh, I was just . . . around,” he said, taking in the shrubberies near the fence and other such features of the yard. “Figured I’d chance you not bein’ wherever you work.” 

Paul tilted his head. “I thought you knew where I worked already.” 

“Oh, no, that’s just Ivan,” he dismissed. “I know the street. I knew where to find you, but you’ll notice, I didn’t find you at work.” 

“Okay,” Paul said intelligently. He glanced back to the bin to find the smoldering ashes sufficiently low and turned away. “Boss didn’t schedule me for today.” 

“Aren’t I lucky,” John drawled, slowly meandering over to the rubbish bin to peer inside. “What were you doin’ just then, Prometheus?” 

The name was odd to hear coming from John’s lips and it threw him off momentarily, but he quickly recovered. John must have been more of an intellectual than he came across as. “It was, uh,” he took a deep breath and thought for a quick second, “just a shopping list.” 

John nodded as though he understood. “Oh, obviously. Those must be destroyed by fire, o’ course.” 

Paul, ever the terrible liar, panicked and began his habit of lying. “I read on – in – in a digest,” he began, having naturally wanted to say ‘on the internet’, “that you can grow, er, apricots – apricot trees. You fertilize them with ashes, it said, and they grow better.” 

John would have to be profoundly stupid to believe him, but he was courteous enough to humor him. “An arsonist and a gardener,” he mused. “Aren’t you quite the Renaissance Man.” 

Smiling nervously, Paul said, “Leonardo  _is_ my middle name.” 

John nodded again, seemingly out of habit, and then paused. “Wait, it is?” 

“Psh, no,” he answered. “Of course not.” 

Defensively, John raised his hands. “Well, how was I supposed to know?” 

“You already know my middle name.” 

“I do?” 

“Yep.” 

John thought for a moment. “I - wait, so Paul’s your middle name?” Confident with this solution, he did not wait for confirmation before continuing: “What’s your first name, then?” 

“James,” Paul answered, glad to be off of the subject of the incriminating evidence he had been burning. “But that’s my dad’s name, and ‘e goes by Jim. Mum always called me Paul.” He wouldn’t usually supply such personal information in normal casual conversation, but he needed to make sure John’s thoughts wouldn’t wander back to the rubbish bin.  

“James Paul McCartney,” John said slowly and carefully, as if tasting the name on his tongue. He paused, considering. “Well, c’mon, Macca, let’s get inside; it’s bloody hot out here.” 

John turned around and headed for his back door, for which Paul was immensely grateful, despite his visitor having essentially invited himself inside; he was just glad that John couldn’t see the infectious smile on his face.  

~ 

“D’you play anythin’ other than guitar?” Paul asked when he saw John eying the piano in the parlor. “Piano?” 

John wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Well, not piano. Play mouth organ, though.” 

Paul wasn’t used to the harmonica being a popular instrument in music; it would soon soar in popularity, he knew, so his temporarily confused expression surprised John. He covered it up by saying, “Oh, mouth organ, right. I thought I misheard.” 

“What’d you think I said?” John pried off-handedly as he trilled the two highest notes between his index and middle finger.  

“No, nothing,” he dismissed, sitting down at the piano bench.  

John sat beside him, and since piano benches were small and intended for only one occupant, that meant he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul. He tried to mind the contact but couldn’t.  

“I assume  _you_ play, right?” he asked, pretending to form a chord with his right hand and hammer the keys like Jerry Lee Lewis.  

“A bit,” he said modestly.  

“Is that ‘a bit’ like your guitar playing?” 

Paul sent him a narrow-eyed withering look.  

“Play me somethin’, then.” 

Paul enjoyed playing for an audience, when they were receptive. He’d learned piano, after all, from his family and relatives all gathered around the piano at holidays; he didn’t mind, now that he and John were on good terms, demonstrating some of that familiarity. He placed his hands naturally, with his right thumb on middle C and the right hand one octave lower, thinking of something to play.   

Because his first instincts were to play songs that weren’t written yet, Paul chose a comedic rendition of chopsticks, a goofy grin on his face as he waited for John to retaliate.  

“Oh, Macca, c’mon, play me somethin’ for real.” 

Halting, Paul sighed and acquiesced. “ _Fine._ ”  

He settled on “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” In his head and on his lips he was silently singing the version from Cass Eliot, but that wouldn’t be recorded until later this decade, he knew. The song had been recorded several times before, though, so it was perfectly normal to assume that he would know it in 1961. 

After the first verse was through, he felt John shift beside him, crossing his arms. “You really  _are_ a Renaissance lad,” he said, impressed. “That is a bit slow, though. Got anythin’ faster?” 

Cheekily, Paul simply increased the pace of the song, and John thumped his shoulder. That threw him off, so his fingers fumbled, and he stumbled to find the next chord; it didn’t sound right, since his hand was now thoroughly put off track, but it did happen to be the first chord of a song he’d played around with on his own.  

It had an older, Vaudevillian swinging feel to it, and his father had always liked to hear it, when he was first coming up with the melody. He had a few words, but they were mostly whimsical and very subject to change – he wasn’t one of the best wordsmiths and never would be.  

“Jesus,” John shook his head. “You’re more than ‘a bit’ good on the piano, lad.” 

Paul’s blushed betrayed his composure. “I’m really not that good,” he protested. “Can’t even read sheet music.” 

Waving a hand, John dismissed the excuse. “Fuck that,” he said. “You don’t have to be able to read what someone else plays to do it yourself.” 

Paul shrugged silently.  

“What else can you play?” 

“Er,” he thought for a moment, “that’s mostly it, really. Guitar and piano. Can do a bit on drums – y'know, piano’s technically percussion, anyway.”  

“But do you actually play drums?” 

Another shrug.  

“A’right,” John nodded. “That means you’re a fuckin’ virtuoso. What can’t you play?” 

Scrunching his shoulders awkwardly and wringing his hands, Paul meandered around the words. “I’m not  _really_ good at anything,” he insisted. “I can’t play, um, a theremin, I guess.” 

“A whatnow?” 

Paul made a motion like he was conducting an orchestra and hummed loudly, in a whining tone he’d heard on the theme of  _Star Trek_. “The one that goes like that,” he said.  

“Never heard of it,” John said, looking at Paul like he had two heads and three noses. “But you don’t play bass either, right? That’s what you said th’other day.” 

“I mean, in theory, I could,” he figured. “It’s just the same bottom strings, right?” 

“So you  _do_ know it,” John concluded.  

He repeated, “In theory. In very primitive and probably incorrect theory.” 

“Think ‘bout it logically,” John began, using his hands to emphasize his argument as though he were proposing a difficult business agreement. “Your mate Harrison wants in my band, right? I don’t want to change lineup - ‘cept for getting rid of that shit drummer - ‘til I’ve got someone to take over for Stu. And Stu won’t get out o’ me hair, since he wants to go t’ Germany so bad. See, if I get you to learn bass, then . . .” 

“Wait,” Paul interrupted. “You want me in your band? You actually want me to play for you?” 

“Yes,” John said confidently. He seemed sure that Paul would leap to accept the offer, because he had his shoulders set back confidently and the corner of his lip curled very nearly curled into an expectant grin.  

“Well, uh,” Paul began, and saw John’s grin falter. “I don’t really know if that would be . . .” 

There were so many things that it ‘could be’, he knew, and of all of them, there were none that he could tell John.  

His shoulders visibly deflated and he cast his eyes down. He hurried to excuse, “No, no, it’s all right,” before Paul could apologize. “I shouldn’t have . . .” 

Paul could tell that John tried to play off the offer as nothing; he didn’t want to damage the new friendship between them by being presumptuous. He must have feared that Paul would take offense to his forwardness or assured confidence.  

As an attempt to let John know that his reluctance to play music did not stem from some reluctance to connect over music, he asked, “You said somethin’ about your drummer just now. What’s up with ‘im?” 

“You know ‘e’s shit,” John waved his hand, looking grateful for the slight change of topic. “Lookin’ for a new one, so I’d like to say we’re in-between, of a sort.” He dug a smoke out of his jacket pocket, not bothering to ask Paul for permission to smoke indoors, which was certainly something Paul expected, but wasn’t sure how he would have responded to. He loathed the very idea of smoking with every ounce of his being, yes, but there was something about the way John relaxed when he had a cigarette that calmed Paul down, almost via second-hand smoke. “We almost had another guy for a while, but he’s gone off with some other band to Germany.” 

The two shared an exasperated smile over the irony of it. “Just like Stu wants to?” 

“Yep,” John popped, taking a drag of the smoke. Upon exhaling, he said, “I heard Best was one hell of a drummer, though. Shame we passed ‘im up.” 

Paul was nodding along absently, busy looking at the way John’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly as the smoke fell out of his lips, but his ears perked at the name. “Wait, Best? Pete Best?” He  _definitely_ recognized the name. “He won’t be playin’ with you guys?” 

John leaned back, momentarily surprised that Paul knew the name. “Didn’t think you’d know Pete, of all people,” he said.  

“George,” Paul excused simply.  

He nodded. “Well, there was apparently a real brief window for ‘im - so high and mighty he was, had to bugger off with a new band just a week after quittin’ his old one.” 

Paul grinned and it was a mechanical action, since his mind was busy processing the fact that the Silver Beatles would not be the band he’d read about online in his time. It was a monumental thing to consider. “You’re just pissed that it’s not  _your_ band he buggered off to.” 

John shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, taking another drag. “Was s’pposed to meet up with us last weekend. Ivan’d arranged it. I was busy, though, and since I missed it, ‘e must’ve figured we weren’t worth his precious time and ran off with Rory Storm and the fuckin’ Hurricanes to the continent.” 

Paul nodded. His ears felt oddly . . . cold, he realized, in a mix of excitement and panic as blood pumped through his veins. He knew something very integral to the future he knew had changed, but he didn’t know what repercussions it would have. Or had already had . . .? He had no idea how relative time worked, and it was hard to think about.  

All he knew was that history had definitely changed, somehow, because of something he’d done – that could be the only explanation, really – and his mind was reeling.  

Paul’s face was one of trepidatious astonishment that must have looked like borderline excitement to John, who felt courageous enough to broach the subject once more. “I figured that, once we got a new drummer, someone’d be willin’ to take Stu’s place. Once we showed more promise.” 

“You show promise,” Paul assured earnestly. “You’re fantastic.” 

John almost blushed.  

At this, something rose in Paul that he felt powerless to stop. He blurted out, “Well, y’know, I guess _I’d_  be willing, if I played bass.” 

That gave John momentary pause. “You’d want to pick it up and learn?” he asked hesitantly.  

“Uh, well . . .” 

“That’s what Stu did,” John said. “He couldn’t even hold it right, but we needed a bass player so bad, and since he was me friend, he said he’d do it.” 

Paul got the fleeting impression that Stu would do a great deal that John asked of him, but he ignored that thought. “I wouldn’t be good,” he cautioned. “I’d be worse than Stu.” 

“’Course,” John agreed. “Stu can’t leave right off the bat, anyway. He can stay on ‘til you’re all right. And there’s not really a problem with three guitars, I s’ppose.” 

“Three?” Paul wondered if he was considering the bass as one of the guitars. Paul had always thought of the two as distinctly different. 

“Yeah,” John tilted his head. “Stu on bass, hopefully someone else on drums, and you, me, and Harrison on guitar. You and I could do rhythm, I’d guess, and your mate could do lead. He played for me a while back; he’s not too bad.” 

“That . . .” Paul had to relax his face so he would not reveal any excitement before he was sure of such a rash decision. He couldn’t betray a smile yet; John would take that as meaning more than Paul meant it. “He’d like that. He’s always wanted to play in a group.” 

“Then you’ll consider? It really could work, y’know. We could have a solid gig.” 

Paul gave him a small, hesitant smile. “I’ll give it some thought.” 

~ 

Fingers itching, Paul skipped down the stairs the next day and stopped at the phone on the wall. He plucked the receiver off and set it against his ear, dialing a number that was now familiar to him.  

“Harrison household,” came a voice after a few rings.  

“Geo?” Paul wasn’t quite adept at hearing whose voice had been distorted through the phone.  

“Hey, Paul,” he said in recognition.  

“Hey.” 

“What’ya callin’ for?” 

It was true that Paul rarely initiated phone calls; he would entertain them if someone called him, but he couldn’t be the first to start the conversation.  

Paul briefly wondered if George was thinking about Friday night. They hadn’t spoken since, because they’d both been busy, and he hoped George hadn’t mistaken that for animosity.  

“I’ve got some news,” he said. “Good news.” 

“Well, get over the pomp and circumstance. What’s goin’ on?” 

“Y’know how you went to John and asked to be in that band o’ his?” 

“Yeah . . .?” 

“And he asked if you could play bass?” 

“Yes?” 

“And then  _you_ asked if  _I_ could play bass?” 

“Yes.” 

“And then  _he_ asked if I could play bass?” 

“Just get it out, mate.” 

“Well, I  _can’t_ , I can’t play bass,” he was excited to finally break the news to George. He felt that most of the time he’d known him, there relationship was George supporting Paul amidst his several breakdowns and crises, instead of simply having a nice time. “But you and I are gonna be in his band as guitars until I can learn bass and switch.” 

Paul felt George’s shock. The silence over the phone was tangible, like a brick wall. “You - Paul – is that . . .  _allowed_?” 

Paul had hoped he’d be rather more enthusiastic about it. “There isn’t exactly any authority on the matter,” he said, “so whatever I decide to do is allowed, I guess.” 

“Then, how do reconcile that with your . . . neutrality?” 

Paul laughed. “Oh! I forgot to mention, I suppose. Pete Best was supposed to play for ‘em as drummer, yeah? Well, John said he’d run off with some other group to Hamburg after he missed a meeting that was supposed to put him in with the Silver Beatles.” 

“What does that mean?” 

“It means that they missed their chance at fitting in with the history that  _I_ know, Geo,” Paul emphasized. “Whatever I did – that fight I had with John earlier, meetin’ up with him on Friday, something stopped ‘im from seein’ Pete Best on Saturday, and some kids who call themselves the Hurricanes picked ‘im up instead.” 

“And you know, for certain, that this Best would never have come back and started playing?” 

Paul shook his head. “Wouldn’t have time,” he explained. “He’ll be in Hamburg for too long. It’s all changed, now. It doesn’t matter if I play with you guys or not; it doesn’t matter what happened first, ‘cause it’s already not gonna happen.” 

George exhaled slowly. “That’s quite the shift in perspective, Paul,” he said slowly. “Are you sure that you won’t, er, regret this later? That you’re not acting . . . brash?” 

Paul’s features morphed into a face of confusion. “George, do you  _not_ want to play with them? Do you not want  _me_  to?” 

“No, no,” he said. “I don’t want to imply that. I just want to make sure that you’re . . . okay with what you’re doing. That you’ll be okay with it, once you realize exactly what you’ve done.” 

“You still think you need to look after me.” 

“That’s what friends do, Paul. That’s what you’d do.” 

He ignored the way that made his stomach twist. “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure about this. For once, I’m sure about something.” 

He could almost hear the shrug. “If you’re sure,” he said, “I won’t complain about it.” 

Paul grinned and forgot that George couldn’t see him.  

“Hold on a mo’,” he said suddenly. “What was that group you said the drummer went off with?” 

Paul scratched his head. “It was some guy and his Hurricanes,” he answered. “Can’t remember the exact name.” 

“Rory Storm? Rory Storm and the Hurricanes?” 

“That may’ve been it, yeah. Why?” 

“No, uh, nothin’,” George said, “nothin’, really. There was just somethin’ I heard a couple o’ weeks ago ‘bout their old drummer.” 

“Oh,” Paul said in such a way that would invite George to explain if he wished but not compel him too.  

“Apparently, he got real sick, started actin’ strange,” George said off-handedly. “Left the band to get himself together, I guess. Rory Storm’s real popular, too. The news went all over.” 

“That’s weird,” Paul agreed, but didn’t give it a second thought.  

* * *

And here I am, finally, with a new chapter! Hope you enjoyed it. Remember that I kinda neutrally exist on tumblr at the-dog-argos, in case you wanted to drop by! also remember that comments give me much-appreciated motivation! 

(and did you catch my not-so-subtle hints toward the end? d'you know what they mean? they mean i'm excited for what's coming)

 

 


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